It's déjà vu all over again
Déjà vu in the metaverse, inducing emotions and nausea in virtual worlds, and cybersickness
🥽🕹📹 Déjà vu in the metaverse
You know that feeling like you’re reliving something that’s already happened but it hasn’t? Well, perhaps that’s virtual reality as a technology, which has had several stops and starts. But cognitive scientist Anne Cleary is using VR to explore the feeling of déjà vu.
In a meta-analysis of all the literature on déjà vu experience, psychologist Alan Brown found that nearly two-thirds of the population has experienced this eerie feeling. While it’s associated with stress and fatigue, it falls into a few categories:
Cognitive processing where two cognitive processes out of synchrony
Memory where the implicit familiarity of unrecognized stimuli, for instance, a scent or sound brings back a recollection
Attention where background attention is followed by intense attention
Brown didn’t discount paranormal accounts of the phenomenon but found that there were also interviews and surveys to draw on too. For years following the paper, which was published in 2003, scientists have taken up the cause of déjà vu.
Most recently, Cleary’s study looked at just one of those hypotheses. The Gestalt familiarity hypothesis suggests that déjà vu happens when there is a spatial resemblance between a current scene and an unrecalled scene in your memory. She explains in The Conversation:
For example, imagine you’re passing the nursing station in a hospital unit on your way to visit a sick friend. Although you’ve never been to this hospital before, you are struck with a feeling that you have. The underlying cause for this experience of déjà vu could be that the layout of the scene, including the placement of the furniture and the particular objects within the space, have the same layout as a different scene that you did experience in the past.
Perfectly suited to a virtual reality recreation, right? The experiment placed people in scenes, some of which had the same spatial layout, triggering a sense of déjà vu. Will that uncanny feeling become more common as we start exploring the metaverse? Perhaps. And it’s certainly one of the many instances of the eerie, uncanny, and downright creepy experiences we have via technological encounters.
It also makes me think of how nostalgia can be considered emotional first aid. That bittersweet emotion can help us cope with bad times by releasing endorphins associated with pleasant experiences and it can prompt us to feel loved and hopeful as we look ahead. Couldn’t the metaverse support nostalgic experiences as a way to build resilience? It would seem so.
🤢 The VR (emotional) hangover
Déjà vu isn’t the only sensory conflict that VR sets in motion though. Cybersickness, motion sickness associated with virtual reality, keeps popping up on my radar. It turns out more people are affected by VR motion sickness than previously asserted (by people selling VR headsets, ahem). While we wait for more comprehensive studies, so far it’s clear that humans aren’t (yet?) adept at resolving the dissonance between what you see and what your body feels.
The physical effects of motion sickness translate to emotional effects. In one recent study about VR in the workplace, just one week of working in the metaverse not only caused productivity to drop but also increased participant anxiety and stress. As the technology takes into account interpupillary distance (one reason why the nausea is more common in women—headsets are designed with a male-sized head as a default) and postural instability, cybersickness may become less common. In the meantime, field of view and frame rate adjustments may help avoid the meta-worst of cybersickness.
(ï¼ _ï¼ )
What if, instead of trying to replicate reality, we morphed it into something new? Universal Everything’s latest exhibition isn’t exactly VR but it makes me wonder how much of the digital-irl connection there is left to explore.
Friday Feeling > Cybersickness
🔑 DEFINITION
The physical and emotional symptoms prompted by exposure to a virtual or simulated environment.
See also: digital rest stops, simulation sickness
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, at least as long as people have traveled by boat. Car sickness, too, has been around as long as people have been driving.
In the 1950s, the first example of motion sickness in simulated environments was documented by Bell Aircraft Corporation. In helicopter simulations, people experienced symptoms similar to motion sickness in other contexts. The same held true for space simulators. The Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, developed to measure the extent of the illness, is made up of nausea, oculomotor, and disorientation scales to reflect the main physical symptoms. Research on simulation sickness found that there were emotional effects where pilots developed anxiety in anticipation of the physical effects.
In the 1980s, motion sickness among video gamers was reported. Certain games like Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 became notorious for inducing motion sickness but the feeling is common to any game with movement whether Minecraft on a PC or World of Warcraft streaming on Twitch.
Cybersickness in virtual reality has been the subject of intense study. The images projected from a typical virtual reality headset have a major impact on the experience of motion sickness. Mismatched motion, limited view of view, refresh rate, motion parallax, and viewing angle all can induce motion sickness.
While cybersickness is most often associated with virtual reality systems and immersive games, it can also emerge from parallax scrolling on websites where a background image remains static but the foreground content moves. It can even occur when quickly scrolling, especially if some of the content is in motion as you scroll in a Netflix queue or social media newsfeed. On a page with several moving ads you may experience cybersickness too.
Originally thought to be caused by a visual disconnect, the sensory disruption is more extensive. It’s vestibular, or what your inner ear senses about your head movement and balance. It engages proprioception, or the sensory receptors in your body, too.
💗 EXPERIENCE
The physical symptoms of cybersickness—nausea, migraines, dizziness—are immediate and obvious. But symptoms like fatigue and disorientation can last for hours after exposure. Evidence suggests that women and people who are stressed, sleep-deprived, or have poor balance are more at risk but it can happen to anyone even if not prone to motion sickness in other contexts.
The emotional effects are insidious. Stress post-use can develop into dread of experiencing the effect again or longer-term anxiety, especially if using virtual reality is a requirement for work or there’s peer pressure to participate. Many people blame themselves for their motion sickness despite it being very common, so guilt can be associated with cybersickness too.
💪 PROTIP
It’s possible to gradually acclimate your senses to VR with repeated exposure, although how much people should train themselves to ignore conflicting sensory stimuli is an open question. Some traditional motion sickness fixes, like acupressure wristbands or ginger, aren’t as effective for cybersickness, but adjusting the field of view, interpupillary distance, and frame rate can help. Some designers are even added rest frames to help people stabilize, similar to digital rest stops on social media.
🤔 LEARN MORE
If there’s a Healthline explainer, you know it’s real
This New York Times piece rounds up the research about cybersickness’ prevalence and its long-term effects
Here’s a video about managing the effects of cybersickness
French startup Boarding Ring released motion sickness glasses that can also be used as an add-on to headsets
Or you can scan this how-to for making adjustments to your game
👋
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗