Listening to joyful or calming music can reduce the intensity of cybersickness symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, and headaches, experienced by virtual reality users, according to a study by researchers at the University of Edinburgh. The study also found that cybersickness can temporarily impair cognitive skills and reaction times, which could limit the use of virtual reality in clinical and educational settings. The researchers suggest that music could be an intervention to encourage greater use of virtual reality in these settings.
The severity of cybersickness experienced while playing virtual reality (VR) games is affected by how our senses adjust to the conflict between reality and virtual reality. Researchers found that the subjective visual vertical (SVV) shifts considerably after playing high-intensity VR games, and this adjustment affects the severity of cybersickness. Those who experienced less sickness were more likely to have the largest change in the SVV following exposure to high-intensity VR. Understanding the relationship between sensory reweighting and cybersickness susceptibility can lead to the development of personalized cybersickness mitigation strategies and VR experiences.
