First published October 2026

VR and motion sickness: what researchers think is going on

Somebody always asks. Usually it is the organiser, quietly, after the second person has taken the headset off and said they felt a bit odd. Is this normal? How many people does it affect? And is there anything you can do about it on the day?

The short answer is that VR discomfort is real, reasonably well studied, and much less mysterious than it was a decade ago. What follows is what the research actually reports, including the parts that do not flatter the technology.

The leading explanation: your senses disagree

The dominant account is called sensory conflict theory, and it dates back to work by Reason and Brand in 1975, later formalised by LaViola in 2000. The idea is simple enough to explain without jargon: your eyes, your balance system and the sensors in your muscles all report on whether you are moving, and when their reports disagree, the body responds with the symptoms we call motion sickness - queasiness, cold sweat, headache, a general wish to stop.

In a headset, the disagreement is easy to create. Your eyes see a kart cornering hard. Your inner ear, sitting still in a chair, insists nothing is happening. A related version, neural mismatch theory, adds a wrinkle: the conflict has to disagree with your past experience of movement as well, which is one reason why experienced players often cope better than first-timers.

There is a competing explanation worth knowing about too. Postural instability theory, proposed by Stoffregen and Riccio in 1988, argues that sickness follows from the body failing to find a stable posture in a new environment, rather than from conflicting signals as such. The two accounts are not fully reconciled, and this is a live research question rather than settled science.

How common is it?

The best single source is a 2020 meta-analysis by Saredakis and colleagues in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. It pooled 55 articles covering 3,016 participants and found an average score of 28.00 on the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, with a confidence interval from 24.66 to 31.35. That is a moderate average - not trivial, not catastrophic.

Content matters. Games scored highest, at 34.26. That figure is worth sitting with, because gaming is exactly what a sports day is doing.

One number gets misquoted more than any other. Across 46 experiments, mean dropout due to VR sickness was 15.6%. That is a dropout rate - the share of participants who left a study because of symptoms - not the share of the population who get sick. If you see a claim that some large percentage of users cannot use VR, check whether the figure is a dropout rate wearing a costume.

What the literature does not give you is a clean population incidence figure. Nobody can tell you what proportion of South African sports-day visitors will feel unwell, because that study has not been done. Anyone quoting a range with confidence is improvising.

What makes it worse

Movement is the big one. In the same meta-analysis, experiences using controller-based locomotion scored 32.55 on average, stationary experiences 28.04, and experiences where the player physically walked 16.99. Artificial movement is the cost centre.

Posture shows up in the older literature as well. Merhi and colleagues, writing in Human Factors in 2007, found that sickness occurred in every condition they tested but was more common when participants were standing. That is a useful data point for anyone designing a seated racing rig, though it does not make seated play risk-free.

There is a hardware story too. A 2021 review by Caserman and colleagues in Virtual Reality found that current-generation headsets produce significantly less cybersickness than older systems, at p<0.001, while noting that symptoms have not disappeared. Better displays, lower latency and better tracking have taken the edge off. They have not solved the underlying conflict.

What seems to help

Several interventions have decent support. Dynamically narrowing the field of view during movement was explored by Fernandes and Feiner in 2016, who reported that it reduced discomfort without obviously hurting the sense of presence; Lim and colleagues in 2020 reported a 37% reduction in sickness when the field of view was restricted to 60 degrees. The trade-off is real - you see less - but it is a lever designers can pull.

Airflow is more interesting than it sounds. Park and colleagues, presenting at IEEE VR in 2024, found that refreshing airflow reduced sickness regardless of which direction it came from, while airflow aligned with the apparent direction of travel actually strengthened vection, the sensation of self-motion. In other words, a fan helps, but pointing it the wrong way conceptually can deepen the illusion rather than calm it.

What the evidence does not support is the idea of guaranteed adaptation. Regular players do tend to acclimatise, and that is a real phenomenon, but promising a visitor that they will "get their VR legs" in ten minutes is not something the research allows. Nor is there a study showing that a fan eliminates the problem.

What this looks like at an event

Our approach is deliberately unglamorous. The Speed Freak rig is a sit-in cockpit, and a fixed viewpoint anchored to a seat reduces a major trigger - the artificial walking and free camera movement that cause much of the trouble. It does not remove the problem: braking and acceleration still create a mismatch, which is why we brief every player before the headset goes on.

In practice that means a short explanation, a gentle first lap rather than a qualifying attempt, and a facilitator watching faces rather than lap times. Anyone who wants to stop stops, immediately, with no discussion. Up to six players can run at once on a 2.5 m by 1.5 m footprint per station, indoors and out of direct sunlight, on standard 220-230V power, which also means we can put the rig where people can sit down and recover quietly if they need to.

None of that is a guarantee. It is simply the difference between a managed experience and a headset handed over a fence.

If you are planning a VR corner and want to talk through the comfort side properly, VR Sports runs the arenas and the rig with a facilitator included - tell us about your event.

Sources

Planning a sports day? Check your date - or call +27 83 733 5133 and ask Richard what will work in your space.

This site sticks to racing. For team-building events, the guides on vrteambuilding.co.za cover what we do from another angle.