IT'S TECH TUESDAY

Motion sickness manifests itself through symptoms such as paleness, headaches, dizziness and nausea and can be caused by unusual passive movements. Passive movements occur for example when travelling by train, bus or car. This results in our body not being able to correctly interpret the different signals being sent by our sense of vision and sense of balance. Many know the scenario; you’re sitting in the car reading a book and you start to feel sick. This happens due to the eye registering motionless reading, while the sense of equilibrium registers motion in your peripheral vision – these contradicting sensations are a challenge for our brain. If, on the other hand, you look out the window your vision perceives the motion that your sense of balance is registering, and the signals are passed to the brain correspondingly.

In some people, driving a simulator can trigger this protective mechanism. Even though the very wide screens used in the Racing Unleashed simulators show motion and the advanced motion system even simulates this motion, the eye registers that in reality nothing is moving around the simulator - the signals sent to the brain do not match. We can protect you from simulator sickness by constantly improving our gameplay with the goal of reducing latency. Latency describes the time delay between inputs in the system (e.g. turning the wheel) and the input’s execution in-game. The higher the latency, the more belated we see the movements we made appear on screen and the higher the chance of feeling sick. All Racing Unleashed simulators have a latency of less than 20 milliseconds.