You don’t have to look far to find reports of people who have used VR headsets and then felt ‘off’ after removing them. While motion sickness is surely the most well-known post-VR symptom, a subset of people say they have experienced feelings of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off their headsets. It’s tempting to brush off such reports as someone having seen The Matrix (1999) one too many times, but it turns out there is a clear scientific basis for the sensation.
I’ve been professionally reporting on the XR industry for nearly 15 years, and along the way I’ve come across many reports of users who described some vague sensation of still being in virtual reality after removing their headset. I queried my social media community recently and was surprised at the response. Across more than 100 replies, people shared their experiences with the feeling. Here’s a sampling:
It happened to me when I was new to VR and had just played Boneworks for hours. Looking down at my body, my hands didn’t feel like they belonged to me. I was trying to grab a knife and fork for dinner and that required a huge concentrated effort, where I was staring at my hands. – @Edward1370
After my first session with Gorilla Tag. Movement felt strange, like my legs weren’t there. Surreal experience, loved it. – @greenlig
In the early days I used DK1 on my Mac and there was a crazy latency. After using it for 2 hours my brain fully adapted to the latency. Taking off the headset was surreal. It was as if the real world had “tracking” issues. 😅 – @robinhuse
It’s only happened to me once. After I wore the vision pro for around 24 hours. Super weird feeling, but fascinating as well. – @RoberJALA
In a sense yes, but more so I went upstairs to eat after a longer VR session when I first got the Quest 1 in 2019 and I stopped myself suddenly because I thought my boundary lines were going to show up. Then I realized I was irl. – @OpalStar3
I played 2 hours of Walkabout Mini Golf just before going to a real Mini Golf course with my friends. Standing on the hole gave me a weird feeling that I was in the game. It did also help me to comfortably win. It was strange though. My eyes kept pixelating the course. – @TheNeoism
Yeah, my hands felt fake for a couple of days but it passed pretty quick, like the brain adapted to the perspective change. – @OneMoreBenjamin
It happens from time to time, where things feels “off” when I’m out of VR, like the body feels sluggish, not my own or out of place for a while. – @KathielRayna
Many struggle to articulate the feeling, but clear themes emerge: an altered perception—a vague sense that the real world, or their own body, doesn’t seem quite as ‘real’ as usual.
The phenomenon may be rare, but it’s certainly real. Fortunately it’s also temporary, as far as we can tell.
The primary cause of feeling ‘stuck in VR’ relates to proprioception. Proprioception is your brain’s model of where your body is in space. The model is essentially an intuition that’s constructed through visual and tactile feedback. And it can be thought of as a ‘real-time’ model that’s constantly updating itself as new feedback is observed.
The proprioceptive model lets you close your eyes and still touch your nose, elbows, or knees with high accuracy. You maintain a remarkably precise sense of your body relative to itself and the world, even with no visual feedback.
VR headsets might be incredibly good at convincing us that we’re standing in another reality, but the simulation is imperfect.
Consider VR motion controllers: they track quickly and accurately, yet there is always some latency and inaccuracy. Many experiences even manipulate controller position deliberately to boost immersion.
These inaccuracies (inherent or intentional) tend to fluctuate throughout the course of using the headset, but they are largely hidden because instead of seeing your real hands, you only see your virtual hands. And since your brain perceives the virtual hands as your own, it starts to incorporate the inaccuracies into its proprioceptive model.
For instance, if you’ve ever played Beat Saber, you’ll know it’s a high-motion game that requires accurately swinging your hands to cut blocks. If you play the game on a system with twice the latency of another headset, you’d expect to be thrown off; however, with practice most people compensate as the brain updates its model to match the imperfect world it sees.
This isn’t limited to controllers. Headsets themselves also have imperfect tracking and a certain degree of latency. That can cause your brain to think that turning your head just takes a little longer than you’re used to.
Or consider the case of a VR game that makes you one foot taller than you are in real life. And what about a game that makes your arms twice as long as normal? At first it would feel very strange and it would be hard to accurately grab things.
With enough time, your brain feels as if you really are that tall—or that your arms are that long—because that’s the reality you see inside the headset. Your brain incorporates the new information in order to make you feel ‘normal’.
Then, when removing the headset, the very same thing happens. Your brain gets new feedback (ie: you’re a different height and your arms are different length than when you were in virtual reality). So now the real you (and by extension, the real world) feel ‘weird’, until you get used to the real world again.
If your arms felt longer a moment ago, your sense of reaching may suddenly feel shorter than expected, forcing more conscious effort to grasp objects—like snagging a coffee cup from the peripheral vision—making the real world feel slightly off.. like somehow you’re still in VR.
I tend to call this weird feeling (as it pertains to perception and VR) ‘proprioceptive-disconnect’, and it’s the root of the feeling of ‘being stuck in VR’. The broader phenomenon that this sensation falls under is called depersonalization-derealization disorder, though it is not exclusive to VR.
Ironically, this feeling of ‘being stuck in VR’ after removing the headset comes from a combination of modern headsets being able to fool our visual system so effectively, while at the same time still having imperfections like tracking latency and inaccuracy. We also have the impressive ability of our brains to adapt to new feedback to thank.
Fortunately the feeling of proprioceptive-disconnect is temporary and generally fades away in an hour or two. Some people are more sensitive to this feeling, and whether or not it will happen to you can equally depend on the capabilities of the VR hardware you are using, and even the specific VR game or app you’re using.
Note: For completeness it’s worth mentioning that there are other factors which can contribute to the feeling of being ‘stuck in VR’ after taking off a headset; two major ones are mismatched IPD setting of the headset (leading to a change in the sense of scale) and the vergence-accommodation conflict (an eye-related artifact caused by modern VR headsets lacking varifocal displays).
Researchers have actually studied and quantified the phenomenon of VR-related proprioceptive-disconnect.
A new paper from researchers at the University of Chicago called VR Side-Effects: Memory & Proprioceptive Discrepancies After Leaving Virtual Reality explores the lingering effects of using VR headsets, which they call “side-effects” of using VR.
Our brain’s plasticity rapidly adapts our senses in VR, a phenomenon leveraged by techniques such as redirected walking, hand redirection, etc. However, while most of HCI is interested in how users adapt to VR, we turn our attention to how users need to adapt their senses when returning to the real-world. We report cases where, even after leaving VR, users experience unintended, lingering side-effects: distortions in proprioception or memory that may pose safety or usability risks.
To investigate, we conducted two studies examining (1) proprioceptive side-effects from altered hand movements (retargeting), and (2) memory distortions arising from spatial mismatches between the virtual and real-world locations of the same object.
In one part of the study, the researchers intentionally exaggerated the position of the hand-tracking (unbeknownst to the subjects of the experiments), a common technique used in VR design called hand retargeting. After the users removed the headset they were asked to perform pointing tasks, which allowed the researchers to quantify how the use of VR impacted the users’ real-life motions after removing the headset.
The researchers found that, “after leaving VR, participants’ hands remained [inaccurate in pointing tasks] by up to 2.75 inches (7 cm), indicating residual proprioceptive distortion.”
In another part of the study, the researchers showed that peripheral awareness of a virtual environment could alter a person’s memory of that environment.
For this experiment the researchers placed a handful of objects in a room, including a seemingly irrelevant fire extinguisher that was placed off to the side. The researchers cleverly began the experiment by asking the subjects to collect a number of pre-positioned balls in the room, which gave the subjects a peripheral awareness of the seemingly irrelevant objects in the room.
Then the subjects were placed in a VR headset which showed a virtual replica of the room. But in the virtual replica, some of the objects were altered (unbeknownst to the subjects); for instance, the position of the fire extinguisher was moved to the other side of the room.
Now in the virtual replica of the room, subjects were asked to repeat the same ball-gathering task as before. After leaving the room and then removing the headset, the subjects were asked to recall where various objects were in the room. The researchers found that a significant portion of subjects misremembered the position of the real fire extinguisher, and instead remembered the location of the virtual fire extinguisher.
While the study didn’t directly address the feeling of being ‘stuck in VR’, it quantified how the use of virtual reality can indeed have lingering side effects that can temporarily alter a person’s proprioception and memory.
The paper’s authors, Antonin Cheymol and Pedro Lopes, stress that these seemingly small effects could lead to potentially dangerous edge-cases.
Consider the use of VR for training emergency personnel using virtual replicas of real spaces. The intent of the training is to familiarize the trainee with emergency procedures, but if the virtual replica that’s used isn’t a careful copy of the real situation that’s being trained for, it could lead to costly mistakes.
While potential dangers from these VR side-effects are definitely edge-cases, such edge-cases will definitely occur once a sufficient number of people are using VR headsets.
The authors emphasize the need for more study in this area, especially considering there’s already millions of headsets out in the world.
While our work suggests that VR can induce side-effects in relatively unconstrained scenarios, more research should follow to broaden our understanding and better assess their risks. First, in this study, we only focused on a limited subset of the large variety of perceptual manipulations that can be presented to a VR user. Therefore, future work should investigate the potential of VR side-effects of other perceptual manipulations, such as walking curvature, speed alteration, or alteration of one’s virtual body structure are likely to reveal similar to the side-effects induced by hand retargeting that we observed in our studies. Altering the perception of an object’s physical properties (e.g., its weight, its tangibility, etc.) could also lead users to adopt mis-adapted, potentially dangerous, behaviors (especially if they incorrectly learn to interact with a fragile or harmful object). Moreover, as previously mentioned, more factors might be hiding at play. For example, the duration of exposure in VR, should be investigated, as it might impact a side-effect’s magnitude and lingering duration. Moreover, the intensity of perceptual qualia, such as presence or embodiment might be interesting predictors to the emergence of VR side-effects.
Feelings of being ‘stuck in VR’ seem to fade rather quickly. But what if the real world itself is just another simulation? Surprisingly, scientists think they have a way to answer that question too.
