Virtual reality is one of this year’s hottest holiday gifts. VR headsets let you immerse yourself in new worlds, making a traditional gaming console seem outdated. But this new gaming technology can have its drawbacks, like motion sickness.

Earlier this month, a team of scientists at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis released their research on virtual reality. In their test, which used the popular Oculus Rift headset, more than half of the people began to feel sick after 15 minutes of use. The rate was higher in women, reaching 80 percent.

Feeling sick from virtual reality isn’t a new problem. Users of flight simulators experienced it in the 1980s, but the trigger it is still unknown. Kinesiologist Thomas Stoffregen tested 18 male and 18 female undergraduate students for motion sickness by playing two different games using the Oculus Rift DK2 headset.

The first game required players to roll a marble through a maze using head motions, which caused 22 percent of the players to feel sick 15 minutes into playing. A different set of 18 male and 18 female undergraduate students played a horror game that required a hand-held controller to move around a building. The rate of motion sickness was higher for this group, with 78 percent of women and 33 percent of men reporting feeling ill.

The gender gap is common across a variety of motion sickness triggers. Stoffregen believes impeding the mechanisms needed for balance cause the nauseous feeling. Another popular theory is that the disconnect between what a person’s body is feeling and what their mind perceives causes the sickness. Because of the way virtual reality alters perception, motion sickness seems to be a heightened risk.

Most virtual reality devices have three components: a device that runs the game, a headset that displays it and a method of input from the player like a hand tracker. The Oculus Rift headset is a head mounted display, also nicknamed an HMD. These displays create 3-D environments that are often designed to be as lifelike as possible.

To create the 3-D effect, a computer, phone or similar device sends images to the headset. The images are displayed on one or two LCD screens and there are lenses in front of each eye that help turn the picture into a 3-D image. The game has coding that allows people to be completely immersed in a virtual world, or to see game objects integrated into the real world, similar to the type of augmented reality used in games like “Pokemon Go.”

The second major factor in the virtual reality experience is motion tracking. Different devices track in different ways, including hand movements, head and eye tracking, or even whole body movements to detect the user’s position.

Virtual reality technology is continually changing to be more realistic and immersive. Creators are also working to limit problems like motion sickness by improving the devices.

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