Virtual reality and 360-degree video can be impressive, but if the experience is not designed carefully you could alienate customers, writes Andrew Hennigan

Since inexpensive virtual reality headsets reached the market, travel and hospitality companies have rushed to take advantage of this new technology to promote properties, destinations and experiences (Virtual Reality: On the road to becoming mainstream?, EyeforTravel, September 4, 2015).

But there’s a catch. Some people find virtual reality experiences literally nauseating. This is caused by ‘virtual reality sickness’, a problem closely related to motion sickness. What happens in the case of motion sickness is that what the body feels and the relatively stationary image from the eyes don’t agree. Virtual reality sickness is caused by the mirror image disconnect between the sensation of being still while the eyes see movement. In both cases the brain reacts to this conflict with nausea or worse.

Daniel Sjölie, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Gothenbourg, has studied virtual reality for 15 years and confirms that nausea is always a potential problem, but adds that there are ways to work around the problem. 

1. Get your ratings right

Oculus VR, a supplier of virtual reality technology, is well aware of this problem and provides guidance for developers of virtual experiences.  Virtual reality games and experiences are given a rating depending on the intensity of the virtual reality effect. A ‘comfortable’ experience involves little or no movement, a ‘moderate’ experience includes some gentle camera movements and an ‘intense’ experience includes anything with complex movements, such as running and jumping.

2. Adopt VR gradually

Another recommendation is that users adopt virtual reality gradually, using it for just a few minutes at a time initially to allow their brain to readjust. After this they should also take a 10 to 15 minute break every 30 minutes, though this does depend on the person.

3. Ensure that the technology is suitable

According to Sjölie two of the main causes of VR problems are slow response times in the hardware and motion in the virtual world. “To avoid this you have to ensure that you have a performant application with suitable hardware and avoid movements in the virtual reality that do not correspond to real movement,” says Sjölie.

But there is a third problem that is harder to deal with. In real life your eyes focus on different distances, which helps estimate distance to an object, while with a headset they are always focused on a screen inside the headset, which is at a fixed distance; this explains why completely eliminating the risk of nausea is very difficult. Designers of virtual experiences minimise this particular problem by keeping virtual objects away from the observer and avoiding objects moving too close towards the viewer’s face.

Taher Baderkhan, CTO and Co-founder of YouVisit, a company that creates interactive virtual reality experiences recommends using hardware that is fast enough to respond quickly to movement.

4. Think carefully about the content you want to create

Baderkhan also emphasises that the creation of the content itself is crucial to a high-quality experience. When determining the kind of virtual reality content a company wants to create they’ll need to think strategically about the scene they are looking to capture. “Companies want to be sure to avoid instances of acceleration and deceleration as these can often lead to a dizzying experience,” he says.  In terms of physically capturing content, the production team must ensure that all camera movements are steady and consistent; avoid jerking movements that can disrupt the viewer’s experience and ultimately cause nausea.

Having said all that Baderkhan argues that the days of discomfort from VR are mostly over because the “hardware is providing a more high quality and realistic experience and because producers now know which practices make for a poor immersive experience”.

Still, by keeping virtual experiences brief and by limiting virtual movements many of the nausea-related problems of virtual reality can be avoided. In the meantime, however, many people have found another way to avoid all of these problems: augmented reality. New games that blend real life with computer generated components like Pokemon Go combine some of the benefits of a virtual world with the reassuring background of the world around us, neatly avoiding the nausea problem.