I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but I am convinced that playing in virtual reality has helped alleviate my chronic motion sickness.

I’ve had horrible motion sickness since I was a baby. There are many stories in my family about our struggles with this. None of them are pleasant so I’ll spare you the details. But anyway, suffice it to say that once I was able to drive on my own, I stopped riding with other people. Sadly, sometimes I would still get sick even if I was the one driving.

Obviously I avoid anything that might cause motion sickness and if I’m desperate, I take medication, but I can’t do that often because even a child sized dose knocks me out.

In April 2017, we bought an Oculus Rift. There are a few games I tried that made me sick after a matter of seconds. I could play Robo Recall, however, and didn’t have that issue at all. It was wonderful. I played the game until I had made it into the top 10 on every leaderboard for the game. In July, my husband wanted me to try a game called Echo Arena. Because there was flying motion involved, I assured him that it would make me sick, but I was pleasantly shocked that it didn’t. Since then, I’ve played around 3,000 matches of Echo Arena and spent countless hours in the game.

Here’s where it gets interesting!

The more I played Echo Arena, the more I began to notice that I didn’t feel “dizzy” all the time (for lack of a better description) in real life. I just didn’t seem to have the same sense of vertigo that I had always experienced and it also seemed like I was experiencing motion sickness less.

I took a plane trip in October (to play Echo Arena in California at a national tournament). Normally I do NOT fly and if I’m required to, I have to take Dramamine and still suffer through motion sickness. For this trip, however, I didn’t take any medication and I was surprised that I managed to make it there and back without getting sick.

Then, in November and December, I decided to try letting someone else drive. Let me say that the last time I tried this was a few years ago. My husband and I made it about 3 miles before I had to throw up. When I got home, I was in bed for the next 2 days with vertigo. I’m not exaggerating when I said I have SERIOUS motion sickness!

Anyway, the short trials went well so this past week I decided to try a longer test. My daughter graduated from Air Force basic training in Texas and my son just arrived back to North Carolina from deployment with the Army in Afghanistan. We have driven through 8 states in about 10 days and I knew I couldn’t possibly do all this driving myself so it was a great time to test my theories.

For the first time in my life, I was not only able to let someone else drive, but I actually read some articles on my phone while they were driving. This would have been impossible 9 months ago.

I am positively certain that playing virtual reality (specifically Echo Arena in my case) has somehow balanced my natural gyroscope so that I no longer experience motion in the same way. It’s the strangest – but most wonderful – thing!

I’m not sure how someone can use this information, but I hope there are neurologists, ENTs (ear, nose and throat doctors), researchers, or others out there who might be interested in this phenomena. (I’ve had at least 2 other people tell me they’ve experienced the same effect, but these are also Echo Arena players. Some VR games make people really sick so is this a positive phenomena that accidentally developed with Echo Arena or is it possible that other games might help as well? Most definitely I believe additional programs could be written that would have the same result.)

Regardless of how it is achieved, if virtual reality can help cure lifelong motion sickness and vertigo, I’m convinced that it could also help with things such as sensory integration disorder, eye muscle imbalance, etc. Hopefully the right people will come across this article and be encouraged to begin or continue research into using virtual reality to treat vestibular-type disorders.