Simulator Sickness Research Summary

Simulator Sickness (SS) is a form of Motion Sickness (MS) that does not require true motion – but does require a wide field of view (FOV) visual display [5, 46, 64]. Like all varieties of MS, an intact vestibular system is necessary to experience SS [12]. It has been called visually induced motion sickness [3, 52, 48] and Cinerama sickness [3, 5, 52]. The term “vection” is used to describe a visually induced sense of self-motion. Vection is “... produced by the nearly uniform motion of a large part of the visual field ... When the entire field moves, subjects soon begin to feel that the relative motion is their own” (Young [64], p. 98). Whether found in a flight simulator, Cinerama theatre, IMAX theatre, or virtual reality simulation, vection causes a MS-like discomfort for a substantial minority of participants. This unpleasant experience is now universally referred to as SS. Further, these MS-like symptoms are now referred to as SS whether the simulator is a fixedbase model, and has no true motion, or a motion-base one with a (limited) range of movement. In other words, if the discomfort occurs in a simulator of any kind it will be called SS in the literature.