VR sickness is a common experience among people who are new to VR. Not everyone experiences it. It came as a huge surprise to me, when I first started playing VR, because I didn’t even know it was something that could happen. I’ve always been prone to motion sickness and when I started playing VR, it hit me hard.

I became addicted to VR the minute after I had my first experience. During work, I would count down the minutes until I could go home and play Beat Saber. Games like Beat Saber are easy to play, for beginners, because you are stationary. For games like Pavlov and VRChat, you’re constantly moving, which would easily make me sick. To begin with, I had to fight the feeling of falling when moving around in a virtual space. Once I got passed that, it would only take about 30 minutes before I felt like I needed to remove the headset. I would fight through it and in an hours time, I would be on the floor wishing I had gotten out of VR sooner.

Most games that have a risk of causing VR sickness come with safety features to help the players. Common features include, vignette on the screen when rotating, locomotion movements so players don’t move with the characters, and snap turning. The best thing to do, if you experience VR sickness, is to only play in short sessions. Eventually you will get a tolerance for playing VR and the sickness will go away. It took me two weeks of playing every second I got, until my VR sickness eventually vanished.