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The term in the medical literature you are looking for is 'Simulator Sickness'. There are 2 main theories on it's occurrence, one of which is the issues with the vestibular system. Wikipedia has a good introduction here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulator_sickness

To note, simulator sickness is not that new, we have been grappling with this for ~65 years since the first flight simulators. Despite the massive funding that the DoD has at it's fingertips, we have not found a cure for it OR there has not been a lot of work done to find a cure. However, it seems that more time in the simulator does help, thought it may then hinder actual flight performance. Also, the more experienced pilots had a higher occurrence of it. Again, it's not that well understood.



Mayo Clinic has some recent work on hooking electrodes up to your vestibular system: http://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-and...


Wow! Now that is some pretty cool stuff! Besides the VR issues, this has some really good applications to things like vertigo and Meniere's disease (unfortunately one of the 'suicide diseases'). Maybe this really will help people!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9ni%C3%A8re%27s_disease#...


I'm slightly skeptical at the moment because there was a lot of buzz at the time of the press release, and then it's total silence for more than a year now. I tried to find any sort of hands on commentary to confirm that it actually works and exists, but no luck.

Still, if it were a total scam I wouldn't think the Mayo Clinic would put their name on it.


Sometime in either the late 1990s or early-2000s (don't recall) there was a company that came out with a vestibular stimulator explicity for VR applications. They apparently sold units for game developers to use, along with a Windows API (hooked into Direct3D or DirectX - or something like that). It wasn't cheap - and ultimately they came into the market at the wrong time (dotcom crunch, and people didn't want VR stuff at the time anyway - the first VR winter was in full swing at that point).


The same phenomenon (visual data conflicting with kinesthetic senses) causes vertigo; a common malady suffered by pilots flying through cloud banks.

It's a major hurdle to overcome.




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