amplified®

SPEED 0.0 km/h EYE 1.60 m RENDER — fps

YOU 1.20 · CAMERA 1.60 · Δ +0.40

■ CARS · ● PEOPLE · ○ HEARD · IN SYNC

Queasy StreetBuilding the street: houses, trees, cars and people. About 5 MB.

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Queasy Street

A test bench for cybersickness. You start at zero: a still camera on a quiet street. Change one condition at a time and find what breaks it, tap how you feel as you go, then press Finish for tips you can use in real VR. Every condition links to its source.

In a headset these effects are real. Take it off the moment you feel unwell.

Click or tap anywhere to start

Test sheet

In the street 0:00

Nausea index · estimate

Settled

heading to 0

−90 s−60 s−30 snow

— estimate— you (MISC × 10)

How do you feel right now? tap a number whenever it changes

Not rated yet. Your own answers are drawn on the chart next to the estimate.

You: motion-sickness profile index not set

Nine questions from the Motion Sickness Susceptibility Questionnaire (MSSQ-short). How often did each make you feel sick or nauseated? Answer for your childhood (before 12) and for the last 10 years. People who get sick in cars and boats tend to get sick in VR too.

Answer all 18 to personalise the index.

Golding, 2006 · Golding, Rafiq & Keshavarz, 2021 · all sources

How the index works

The index is a teaching model, not a measurement. It adds up points for conditions that make people sick, then takes a share off for each condition that helps, then scales by your profile and your time in the street.

index = (sum of points) × (1 − each help) × your profile × time

Points and percentages are ours. The research tells us the direction and roughly how strong each effect is, not exact numbers that add up. We set larger weights where the evidence is strong and small ones where it is weak.
Time. Sickness grows with time in a headset, roughly in a straight line, and falls with repeated sessions (Kennedy et al., 2000). We add 3% a minute, up to 60%.
Recovery. After exposure, sickness fades at about the rate it built up (Bos et al., 2005). Most people feel better within half an hour; some feel it for hours (Dużmańska et al., 2018).
Your own answer beats the estimate. The orange line on the chart is you, on the Misery Scale used in motion-sickness research (Bos et al., 2005). If it disagrees with the estimate, believe it.

All sources

Autistic users: what the research says

Research on VR comfort for autistic people is thin, and none of it gives numbers we could put into the index. So the index does not change for autism. These are the findings we could verify, next to the conditions they touch.

C5 Sound, C6 Sudden loud noise. In a survey of 4,104 autistic people, 60% had auditory over-responsivity at the time and 71% had had it at some point. A sudden horn or a soundtrack that does not fit can be far more than a startle.Carson et al., 2022 · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
C1 Camera motion, C4 Movement around you. When a field of dots rushed toward them, autistic children swayed much less than children with Asperger syndrome or typical children. Reactions to visual motion can differ, so the train illusion may land differently. The study did not measure sickness.Gepner & Mestre, 2002 · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Every condition. Documented adverse effects of headset VR include cybersickness, anxiety and sensory disturbances, and the authors note that research on these effects in autistic users is largely absent. They recommend planning sessions to minimise them.Schmidt, Newbutt, Schmidt & Glaser, 2021 · Frontiers in Virtual Reality
Wearing a headset at all. In a pilot with 29 autistic adults, all were willing to wear the headset and most found it enjoyable, with a strong sense of presence.Newbutt et al., 2016 · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Everything starts at 0: a still camera on a quiet street. Change conditions and see what breaks it. Conditions that help take a share off the index; they cannot push it below 0. The index is a teaching estimate built from published findings, not a medical measure.

3D models: Kenney (CC0). The jeep you drive: “Car” by jeremy, CC-BY 3.0, via Poly Pizza.

Your session

What to try in real VR

Queasy Street