#656: StillScreen

When your balance system and visual system don’t agree about what’s happening, the brain apparently comes to the conclusion that one of them is hallucinating; perhaps due to having been poisoned. Time to ransack the glove compartment for that waxed paper bag.

Even when sitting still, I can get ‘motion’ sickness simply playing a computer game or watching a ‘movie’ that moves in the ‘wrong’ way on a screen. Today’s invention is a way to combat such nausea.

DVD players, games machines and computer screens in general would be equipped with a key sequence which would allow the viewer to reduce the active screen area to about half its normal size, leaving a textured, static border around the scaled-down imagery.

Suddenly having peripheral vision filled with a substantial, fixed frame would emphasise the message that a screen was being viewed. This would greatly lessen the influence of the signal sent by the eyes saying “the world is moving, but the vestibular organs claim it’s not.” Although the immersive realism would be temporarily diminished, this would also reduce any tendency to feel ill and could be instantly removed when the offending sequence was over.