“They have the same symptoms, same sensations, same everything.” Time is not on your side “Clinically there is absolutely no difference between the two conditions,” says Eugene Nalivaiko, an associate professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia who has studied both general motion sickness and cybersickness extensively. And that creates a similar conundrum for the body. Rather than moving while perceiving being still-as you might feel on a boat, while looking at the immovable horizon-this time you’re still but perceiving motion. The 21st-century twist is that this is all flipped in virtual space.

The English word “nausea” actually comes from the Greek word for ship: naus. If it perceives motion when your visual system doesn’t, the dissonance can make you hurl or, at the very least, feel dizzy and unsteady. 300, the ancient Chinese began documenting nausea from all kinds of sources, with specific words to describe each distinct experience: Traveling in a cart inspired zhuche, or cart-influence, while a ship caused zhuchuan, or ship-influence.Īs scientists now understand it, the key to all forms of motion sickness is your vestibular system: the combination of sensory organs in the inner ear and brain that controls balance and spatial orientation. The English word “nausea” actually comes from the Greek word for ship: naus.īy A.D. Reports of illness brought on by mismatched perception go back as far as 800 B.C., when the ancient Greeks wrote about a “plague at sea.” Despite their important role in trade, war, and migration, ships could be so intolerable for some passengers that nausea wasn’t merely a symptom of seasickness but the only word for it.

Cybersickness is space sickness is car sickness is sea sickness. “Virtual reality or augmented reality cybersickness is just a kind of a cousin to other forms of sickness related to perceived motion, and scrolling would be another form.” What’s old is new againĬybersickness is really just the latest neologism to describe the ongoing tussle between the human body and a world we continuously transform with technology. “Any kind of perceived motion is going to cause cybersickness,” says Kay Stanney, CEO and founder of Design Interactive, a small company researching human systems integration. (Also find out how video calls can tax the brain, leading to the phenomenon called Zoom fatigue.) Now, it seems the scrolling movement in a Netflix queue or a social media newsfeed also has the power to cause cybersickness when used under exceptional circumstances: all day, every day. In 2011, 30 to 80 percent of virtual reality users were likely to experience cybersickness, though improved headset hardware brought the range down to 25 to 60 percent by 2016. But our bodies were not designed to primarily exist in virtual space like this, and as our collective digital time creeps upward, something called cybersickness seems to be leaking into the general population.Ĭharacterized by dizziness and nausea, cybersickness has mostly been studied in the context of aggressively submersive niche technologies, such as virtual reality headsets. It’s where we’ve worked, taken classes, attended parties, and gotten lost in 2020’s voracious news cycles. The pandemic has forced most of us online at incomparable rates. The cause was something more insidious: the physical toll of living almost entirely in a virtual world. “I was forced to stay inside in my hot apartment without any escape except the craziness happening on Twitter,” he says.įor a week he scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, until he felt “weighed down, dizzy, nauseous.” At the time, he attributed these symptoms to the air quality, or even wondered if he had contracted the coronavirus. He could only fill his days switching between working remotely on his computer, watching TV, or scrolling through endless fire updates on his phone. It was September 2020, and without access to the outdoors during a pandemic, it became even more difficult for the 27-year-old writer to see other people.

When a dark ashy cloud born from wildfires settled over the Seattle metropolitan area, Jack Riewe was among the millions of people suddenly trapped indoors.

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