We’ll do more than just play in the metaverse; we’ll also go shopping, trade items, make friends, and even work. Just ask any well-known consumer brand’s marketing director.
However, cybersickness, a digital kind of motion sickness that appears to be far more common with virtual reality headsets, is posing a serious problem for the tiny but growing metaverse ecosystem. Managers and marketers might be in for a bad surprise.
Cybersickness isn’t only a condition that makes for interesting headlines, despite the fact that publications like Glamour and Neuroscience News have started to write about it.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Nature have both published clinical studies with titles like “Reducing Cybersickness in 360-Degree Virtual Reality” and “Clinical Predictors of Cybersickness in Virtual Reality (VR) among Highly Stressed People.”
Despite technical advancements in Virtual Reality (VR), the latter study’s abstract noted that “Users are continuously battling symptoms of nausea and dizziness, the so-called cybersickness.” Extremely painful and disruptive to the immersive VR experience are cybersickness’s symptoms.
According to natural science studies, cybersickness has effects beyond only participating in metaverse games.
The use of virtual reality (VR) in the treatment of mental disorders is growing, and cybersickness has arisen as a key barrier to conquer, according to the paper, which stated that “the clinical variables of cybersickness are still not well known.”
Many employers want us to spend our working hours there, and businesses like blockchain-based metaverse platforms like Decentraland and MMO game developer Fortnite think it’s where we’ll all spend our spare time.
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has been actively marketing his idea of the metaverse as a setting for post-work collaboration and socializing. Furthermore, “Web3” has become so well-known that marketers and C-suites increasingly believe it requires a plan and perhaps even a chief metaverse officer.
The automotive industry was an early user of the 9-to-5 workday. Nvidia, a manufacturer of graphics processing units, has teamed up with companies like BMW and Rimac Bugatti to create metaverse-style workplaces that handle everything from actual design tools and meeting areas to marketing settings where potential customers can test drive cars and experience different interior design options.
However, other businesses are using Nvidia’s Omniverse Cloud as a base to build comparable mini-metaverses for customers, including the global industrial conglomerate Siemens and the consulting behemoth Deloitte.
