Simulation Sickness, VR Sickness, and How to Fix Both

The first thing many users notice when putting on a VR headset for the first time is the unreal sensation of being in a new, virtual world.

The second thing they usually notice is that they’re getting dizzy.

Education teams love the wow factor of VR. They do not love session drop‑offs, early exits, and “I can’t continue” reports. This guide explains the two kinds of discomfort your learners may feel in stereo VR, why they happen, and what to build so your programs stay usable. The goal is simple: more learners completing more minutes, with fewer sick notes.

Motion and VR sickness is a constant consideration within the panoply of accessibility concerns in XR development, because it represents one of the great barriers to adoption of XR (and especially VR) technologies. This concern can torpedo virtually any design objective. It doesn’t matter if it’s a flight simulator or an art project, emesis pretty much always gets in the way of what you’re trying to do.

Before we get into how to mitigate motion sickness in VR, let’s get some terminology out of the way.

This blog post will tackle accessibility challenges relating to Stereo Rendered platforms, meaning virtual environments that display two views to the user, one for each eye. Within this context, two types of “sickness” can be observed, and we will be exploring their history, causes, and mitigation.

Part 1: Simulation Sickness

The first type of sickness users can experience in VR is “Simulation Sickness.” This is a type of motion sickness, and as a result, shares the same root cause.

Humans have two main methods of understanding their position and orientation in the world. Visual orientation uses reference points, such as a horizon, to produce the sensation of motion. Vestibular sensation does the same thing using the sensation of inertia in specific organs, primarily in the inner ear. These two systems normally complement each other, with different situations where they provide the best information.

Simulation sickness occurs when there is a consistent difference in the understanding of the world between these systems. Reading in the backseat of a car, for instance, tends to induce motion sickness because the visual systems register no motion (you’re looking down into the static interior of the car), but the vestibular system registers the acceleration of the car as it moves down the road.

In VR, the inverse happens: the user visually registers the sensation of motion while the vestibular system feels no such thing (this is called “vection” and is a common problem among pilots).

Mitigating motion sickness in VR applications involves reducing this sensory incongruity. The easiest way to do this is just…don’t move the user within the virtual world.

3 Tips to Reduce Motion Within Your VR World

Part 2: Virtual Reality Sickness

Didn’t we just talk about Virtual Reality Sickness? Incredibly, no. Simulation sickness is a type of motion sickness, and virtual reality sickness is most closely described as a complex type of eye strain.

Let’s do a quick exercise: hold up a finger about six inches from your one eye, close the other eye, and focus on that finger. Note that the finger is in focus, but whatever is behind it is blurry. If you focus on what is behind it, the finger instead becomes blurry.

This exercise demonstrates that when a human looks at something, there are two types of focus going on:

• Convergence, which is the pointing of two eyes at the same spot.
• Accommodation, which is the lens inside your eye that changes shape to bring different depths into focus.

A quirk of stereo rendering is that they can only represent depth with convergence; from the perspective of an individual eye, the entire image is at the same depth. This is called vergence-accommodation conflict.

Sensitivity to this effect is less common but harder to mitigate than regular simulation sickness. There are a small number of users who are completely unable to do so much as put a headset on without near-instant headaches.

How to Mitigate Virtual Reality Sickness

This effect can only be mitigated by displays that are capable of representing depth. These include technologies like light field displays or the Meta Butterscotch Varifocal and Half-Dome prototypes, none of which are ready for mass production (and in the case of light field displays, only recently exited the realm of science fiction).

If you’re looking for the next big leap in XR tech, pay attention to the solutions that appear for this problem.

Questions to ask your VR vendor

VR can help learners master hard tasks faster, but only if they can stay in the experience. Design to reduce visual–inner‑ear disagreement and to avoid eye‑strain triggers. Give users control over comfort settings and a seatbelt in the form of a stable frame, snap turns, and short first sessions. Offer a desktop path for those who need it. Pilot with diverse users and track comfort like a core outcome. When you do that, you turn VR from a one‑time demo into a repeatable learning tool that people finish.

Magic EdTech designs simulations that learners can finish. Our team builds comfort‑first VR with stable environments, snap turns, optional teleport or grab‑to‑move, clear UI, and desktop parity for sensitive users. If you are scoping a new module or seeing early exits, we can help.

Set up a quick review or ask for a short playable demo built to your use case.