Sickness simulator
The human being is a living being that, for evolutionary reasons of development, is very much oriented towards and dependent on the (optical) sense of sight in terms of foraging for food and recognizing dangers. As a result, the human brain usually "blindly" trusts what the eyes see. Since the eyes "see" movement in stationary or moving simulators, the brain is then initially convinced that real movement is predominant and passes this information on to the body. This creates a physical feeling of movement. The term simulator sickness or English simulator sickness ( English / Latin about "nausea through (pr) deception") describes a feeling of nausea , which can come about in some people through deception or irritation of the sensory organs , because the human sense of balance in turn communicates to the brain that there is no realistic movement or no movement at all.
Flight simulator / driving simulator
As a side effect in the flight simulator , nausea can occasionally occur because the pilot optically perceives movements that do not correspond to the kinesthetically experienced movements. Even sophisticated hydraulic motion simulators cannot simulate complete real physical movements to the brain. The cause for this is assumed to be non-physiological latency times between the stimulation formation triggered by hydraulic movement simulators in the vestibular system (sacculus, utriculus and semicircular duct = equilibrium apparatus) and the optical input. Similar effects can be observed in the tilting train . A prominent victim of the simulator sickness is the seven-time Formula 1 world champion Michael Schumacher , who for this reason was only able to use the Mercedes GP simulator in exceptional cases to prepare for the races and instead usually use the conventional training methods directly on the track with one real racing car had to perform.
Rotary drum simulator
In the case of immobile simulators, the feeling of nausea is caused by simulating a movement in the simulator's eye that contradicts the information provided by the balance organ in the inner ear .
Kenneth L. Koch runs a rotary drum simulator at Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania. It consists of a huge drum that rotates around a chair in the middle. Vertical black and white bars alternate on the inside of the drum. Involuntarily, the test person fixes the bars, and after a short time it seems to him that it is not the drum that is turning, but himself. In this test arrangement , artificially nausea is created and methods and drugs against seasickness are researched.
Head-mounted display
When using head-mounted displays , which simulate a virtually expanded or completely simulated reality by projecting onto the retina or a screen fixed very close to the eye, VR disease occurs . If a head tracker is also used, which causes the displayed image to be changed to a head movement in real time, the symptoms can occur if the projection is adjusted too late or asynchronously. Here, too, as in the flight simulator, the brain registers the difference between the movement performed and the visually perceived changes in reality. Blurred representations can also trigger the side effects.
