Every new VR headset launch comes with some variation of the same claim: “We’ve solved the comfort problem.” And every time, a meaningful percentage of users still get queasy within their first twenty minutes. The reality is more nuanced than either the optimists or the sceptics suggest.

VR motion sickness — technically called visually induced motion sickness or cybersickness — remains the single biggest barrier to mass adoption. It’s gotten significantly better. But “better” and “solved” are different things.

What Actually Causes It

The core problem is straightforward to describe and fiendishly difficult to fix. VR motion sickness occurs when your visual system tells your brain you’re moving but your vestibular system (the balance organs in your inner ears) disagrees. Your brain interprets this sensory conflict as a sign that something is wrong, and it responds with nausea.

This isn’t a bug in human biology. It’s a feature. For most of evolutionary history, sensory conflict between vision and balance indicated poisoning (hallucination), so the body’s response was to trigger nausea and vomiting. Useful when you’ve eaten bad berries. Less useful when you’re trying to play a VR game.

The degree of mismatch matters. Small discrepancies — like a subtle delay between head movement and visual update — can be tolerated. Large mismatches — like your character running forward while you’re standing still — hit some people hard.

What’s Gotten Better

Latency is dramatically lower. The Quest 3 and similar modern headsets achieve motion-to-photon latency under 20 milliseconds. A decade ago, consumer headsets were north of 50ms. This matters enormously. Lower latency means the visual world responds to your head movements almost instantly, reducing one of the primary triggers.

Refresh rates have climbed. Most current headsets run at 90Hz or 120Hz, compared to the 60Hz that early consumer headsets sometimes dipped to. Higher refresh rates mean smoother visual updates and less perceived stutter during head movements.

Foveated rendering helps indirectly. By rendering the centre of your gaze at full resolution and reducing detail in the periphery, foveated rendering lets headsets maintain consistent frame rates even with complex scenes. Dropped frames are a significant comfort killer, so anything that prevents them helps.

Optics have improved. Pancake lenses, which most current headsets use, produce less distortion and fewer visual artefacts than the Fresnel lenses common in earlier generations. Cleaner optics mean less visual weirdness for your brain to reconcile.

Passthrough is a pressure release valve. Mixed reality headsets like the Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro offer the ability to blend real and virtual content. When users feel uncomfortable, they can see their real surroundings. More importantly, many mixed reality experiences don’t trigger motion sickness at all, because your vestibular system and your visual system are largely in agreement.

What Still Hasn’t Been Fixed

Artificial locomotion remains the primary offender. If you’re moving through a virtual world using a thumbstick while your body is stationary, a significant minority of people will feel sick. Estimates vary, but research consistently suggests 20-40% of users experience discomfort with smooth artificial locomotion, with somewhere between 5-15% finding it intolerable.

Teleportation movement — where you point, click, and instantly appear at a new location — is a widely used alternative. It works well for comfort but breaks immersion and feels awkward in many contexts. Comfort mode options like tunnel vision (darkening the periphery during movement) help some users but not all.

Individual variation is enormous. Some people can spend hours in intense VR with no discomfort. Others feel queasy watching someone else play. This variation is influenced by genetics, age, prior VR experience, and factors we don’t fully understand. There’s no universal solution because there’s no universal sensitivity profile.

Content design still matters more than hardware. A poorly designed VR experience on a Quest 3 can make people sick faster than a well-designed one on an older headset. Camera movements that the user doesn’t control, unexpected acceleration, unstable horizons, and low frame rates in specific scenes all trigger discomfort regardless of how good the headset is.

Prolonged sessions remain problematic. Even users who feel fine for 30-60 minutes can develop symptoms in longer sessions. This is a particular concern for enterprise applications where workers might need to use VR for extended periods.

What the Industry Is Working On

Research continues on several fronts. Galvanic vestibular stimulation — using small electrical currents to make your balance organs “feel” the movement your eyes are seeing — has shown promise in lab settings but is years away from consumer products. Some researchers are exploring pharmaceutical approaches (anti-nausea medications), but nobody wants the solution to VR sickness to be “take a pill first.”

On the software side, adaptive comfort systems are becoming more sophisticated. These use eye tracking and biometric data to detect early signs of discomfort and automatically adjust the experience — reducing field of view, slowing movement speed, or suggesting a break.

Content guidelines from Meta, Sony, and Apple are also getting more specific and evidence-based. Developers have better tools and knowledge than ever for creating comfortable experiences. But guidelines are only useful if developers follow them.

The Honest Picture

VR comfort in 2026 is genuinely good for the majority of users in the majority of well-designed experiences. If you tried VR five years ago and felt sick, it’s worth trying again. The hardware improvements alone make a substantial difference.

But the industry hasn’t “solved” motion sickness, and claiming otherwise does a disservice to the people who still experience it. The best current approach is a combination of good hardware, thoughtful content design, user-adjustable comfort settings, and honest communication about limitations.

For the foreseeable future, VR will work beautifully for most people in most contexts, and it will remain uncomfortable for some people in some contexts. That’s a much better position than where we started. It’s just not the finish line.