This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 386 in July 2023, as part of our Tech Tales series. Every month we talk about the ups and downs of PC hardware, with a look back on our own history with the hobby.
It’s not because the idea of seeing my iPhone menu buttons everywhere I look, all day, forever, is so nightmarish, or because £3,500 for a toy was presented like a perfectly rational purchasing decision. Me and VR, we’ve just never hit it off. Like a great many people, virtual reality makes me feel pretty sick. It’s not that I haven’t tried to push past it, either. There’s a lot of talk about getting your sea legs in VR, acclimating to the strange sensation of perceiving motion with your eyes and expecting to feel it with your body but getting nothing. I saw the potential VR had for sim racing.
What we do know, more or less, is that the nausea we feel after experiencing VR is a form of motion sickness. It’s basically a runtime error in our vestibular system, the complex instruments in our inner ear that track our position and movement. The data that our eyes is giving to our vestibular system is that we’re in motion, whether we’re on a ship on choppy waters, in a car, or in Project CARs, but in each case our body itself is stationary.