According to (Motion Sickness in VR. Last week, Digital Detox visited MUXL… | by Anastasiia Ku | UX Planet) "Motion sickness is a condition in which a disagreement exists between visually perceived movement and the vestibular system’s sense of movement."

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According to Wikipedia "The vestibular system is the sensory system that contributes to the sense of balance and spatial orientation for the purpose of coordinating movement with balance. [Wikipedia]"

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This sadly is a side effect of VR technology at its current state, which can cause symptoms like nausea, dizziness, fatigue headaches etc. to occur. The moist common reasons as to why motion sickness occurs in VR games is because of two reasons one is scene motion which in this article is said to:

 

" visual movement of the whole virtual scene that would not normally occur in the real world [Jerald].Scene motion in a VR environment may be intentional or unintentional. Intentional scene motion would generally be created to make the virtual world behave differently than the real world; whereas unintentional scene motion is normally caused by shortcomings of technology, such as latency or inaccurate calibration, mismatched field of view, optical distortion, etc. Noticeable scene motion can degrade a VR experience by causing motion sickness, reducing task performance, lowering visual acuity, and decreasing the sense of presence."

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And the other reason is believed to be a theory called the sensory conflict theory which is the theory that " motion sickness occurs as a result of a sensory disagreement between expected motion and motion that is actually experienced." meaning that there is a disconnect between what the player is seeing and what they are sensing as with current VR technologies a player can see themselves touching and object but yet don't get the satisfaction of feeling the objects presence in their hand leading to motion sickness caused by sensory disagreement

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[My thoughts]

for my game I believe the presence of motion sickness to be a bad thing in a way as it takes away from the experience that the player is having which means my desired message is lost but also motion sickness may be usefully in certain situation to portray an accurate depiction for how someone having anxiety may feel as some people have reported throwing up as a result of there anxiety (this is shown in my reading week research where I spoke to a friend about there own experience with anxiety)

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To help the player avoid motion sickness I designed the whole main menu environment to be a calming area where they can go when ever they like ideally without losing progress and take the headset off take as much time as they need away from the game and when they arrive back they are greeted with a nice environment and not chucked straight back into the level that cause them to feel sick.