Queasy Street: why VR makes you sick, and how to stop it

VR motion sickness is the reason many people take a headset off after ten minutes and never put it back on. In one large study of 15 to 60 minute sessions, more than 80% of people reported some symptoms and about one in eight quit early (Stanney et al., 2003). It has a name, cybersickness, and most of what causes it is now well understood. Queasy Street lets you feel it, and fix it, in a few minutes.

Start at zero, then break it

You stand on a quiet street with a still camera, and the nausea index reads 0. Then you change one condition at a time and watch the trace climb: walk, drive, turn, let a car reverse past you, mirror the sound, raise the camera above your real eye height, drop the frame rate, add head-tracking delay, or set the street rocking slowly like a boat. Turn the comfort aids on, a vignette, a fixed horizon, a virtual nose, music you like, and watch it come back down.

It runs in any browser. With a WebXR headset you can step inside it, where the comfort aids are drawn in 3D and your controller's trigger moves you.

Why VR makes you sick

The leading explanation is sensory conflict: your eyes report that you are moving while your inner ear reports that you are still, and the brain reacts as if something is wrong (Keshavarz et al., 2015). Every condition in the experiment links to the study behind it. A few of the clearest findings:

• Speed matters, up to a point. Nausea and the sense of motion rose as virtual speed went from 3 to 10 m/s, then levelled off (So, Lo & Ho, 2001).
• Snap turning beats smooth turning. Turning in 22.5° jumps instead of a smooth sweep cut sickness scores by about 40% (Farmani & Teather, 2020).
• A narrower view while moving helps. Gently darkening the edges during motion, the "tunnel vision" or vignette option in many games, lowered sickness, and most people did not notice it (Fernandes & Feiner, 2016).
• Being in control helps. People who steered their own movement got less sick than people taken on a scripted ride (Stanney & Hash, 1998).
• Delay and low frame rates hurt. Lag between moving your head and the image updating causes sickness (Stauffert et al., 2020), and in one headset study symptoms dropped noticeably from 120 frames per second up (Wang et al., 2023).
• Slow rocking is the worst. Around one sway every five seconds (0.2 Hz) is the most nauseating motion there is (Golding, Mueller & Gresty, 2001).

Where the evidence is thin we say so. Sudden loud sounds and head bob, for example, are reported by people who make VR, but we found no study that settles them.

Tell it how you feel

The index is an estimate. Your own answer beats it, so you can rate yourself as you go on the Misery Scale used in motion sickness research, and your rating is drawn next to the estimate. Answer nine questions about cars, boats and funfair rides (the MSSQ-short) and the index adjusts to how susceptible you are. When you finish, you get a short report: what pushed you up, and practical tips for real VR, each tied to its study.

Quest 3, Vision Pro and any other headset

Whatever you use, the same levers apply. Run the headset at its highest refresh rate and close anything that makes it stutter. Turn on comfort options when an app offers them: snap turning, the vignette, teleport movement. Keep first sessions short and build up over days; sickness grows with time in a session and falls with repeated sessions (Kennedy et al., 2000). And stop at the first sign of it: it fades at about the pace it built up.

What we learned making real 360° scenes

Some of the logic we use to make RVer's real 360° scenes comfortable is demonstrated here, side by side with the research behind it. Queasy Street is the playground version: break it on purpose, and you will see why a well-made 360° scene feels effortless.

How it is built

Three.js with WebXR, sound synthesised live with the Web Audio API, and low-poly models from Kenney (CC0) plus a jeep by jeremy (CC-BY 3.0). The whole street is about 5 MB and around 100 draw calls, so it runs on an ordinary laptop. The source is open. It is a teaching model, not a medical measure.