If you’ve experienced the thrill of playing around in VR, you also know that it comes with a significant bit of nausea. As the sights around you mimic motion and speed, your inner ear gets tricked into thinking you’re moving when you’re actually not. You try to push past it, but before long you’ve bought yourself a one-way ticket to puke city.
But researchers at the Mayo Clinic have been developing a way to stop you from getting sick in the first place. But with one catch: it involves zaps of electricity to your head.
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It’s not as dangerous as it sounds, but it does involve well-placed electrodes in addition to the VR headset. Essentially, a steady stream of electricity in the direction of the motion onscreen stimulate the inner ear to help the brain match pictures with action.
The Mayo Clinic has licensed this technology to a Los Angeles company called vMocion, so it’s much closer to reality than fiction. But whether it becomes popular is another thing.
I mean, between throwing up and zaps to the head, which would you choose?
Zapping Your Skull Could Alleviate Virtual Reality Motion Sickness on MIT Technology Review
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