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In 2011, 30 to 80 percent of virtual reality users were likely to experience cybersickness, though improved headset hardware brought the range down to 25 to 60 percent by 2016.
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But our bodies were not designed to primarily exist in virtual space like this, and as our collective digital time creeps upward, something called cybersickness seems to be leaking into the general population.Ĭharacterized by dizziness and nausea, cybersickness has mostly been studied in the context of aggressively submersive niche technologies, such as virtual reality headsets.
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It’s where we’ve worked, taken classes, attended parties, and gotten lost in 2020’s voracious news cycles. The pandemic has forced most of us online at incomparable rates. The cause was something more insidious: the physical toll of living almost entirely in a virtual world. “I was forced to stay inside in my hot apartment without any escape except the craziness happening on Twitter,” he says.įor a week he scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, until he felt “weighed down, dizzy, nauseous.” At the time, he attributed these symptoms to the air quality, or even wondered if he had contracted the coronavirus. He could only fill his days switching between working remotely on his computer, watching TV, or scrolling through endless fire updates on his phone. It was September 2020, and without access to the outdoors during a pandemic, it became even more difficult for the 27-year-old writer to see other people. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.When a dark ashy cloud born from wildfires settled over the Seattle metropolitan area, Jack Riewe was among the millions of people suddenly trapped indoors. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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