This chair allowed participants in a shooting game to fly through a futuristic 3D city in space and thereby test their susceptibility to cybersickness. | Image: N. Tian and R. Boulic (2024)

Many people get nauseous when they immerse themselves in virtual worlds using a VR headset. That’s also the experience of the computer scientist Nana Tian of EPFL, who’s now developed a protocol to determine what triggers cybersickness in an individual, such as movements like yawing, rolling or pitching. “It’s essential to find the critical triggers for cybersickness. Customised applications that can avoid them could provide access to virtual reality for everyone”, says Tian.

N. Tian und R. Boulic: The Least Increasing Aversion (LIA) Protocol: illustration on identifying individual susceptibility to cybersickness triggers. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2024)

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