The study, led by Yuehua Geng and colleagues at Hebei University of Technology together with a collaborator at Tianjin Huanhu Hospital, rests on a growing body of evidence that the vestibular organs of the inner ear are exquisitely sensitive to magnetic fields. The dominant theory holds that the tiny crystals of calcium carbonate embedded in the vestibular system’s otoconia, which normally act as gravity sensors, behave faintly like magnets when exposed to strong, static or low-frequency magnetic fields. When a magnetic field is applied asymmetrically, these crystals experience forces that trick the brain into perceiving head movement that never happened. This is why patients emerging from high-field MRI scanners often report vertigo and involuntary eye movements called nystagmus. Rather than treating this effect as a nuisance, the researchers asked whether it could be harnessed deliberately, and in a controlled dose, to counteract the sensory conflict that gives rise to VIMS.

That conflict is thought to sit at the heart of motion sickness itself. When the eyes report swift, sweeping motion through a virtual landscape while the vestibular system reports a body sitting perfectly still, the brain receives mismatched signals about self-motion. The prevailing explanation, often framed through sensory conflict or postural instability theory, suggests that this discrepancy triggers the classic symptoms of nausea, dizziness, sweating, fatigue and headache. If magnetic vestibular stimulation can add a calibrated vestibular signal to the mix, the researchers reasoned, it might partially reconcile the conflicting streams of information, or at least shift the balance system’s set point in a way that reduces the perceived conflict. Conversely, an improperly tuned stimulation could add yet another discordant signal and make the sickness worse. The study was designed to test precisely this dose-dependence.

Twenty healthy young adults took part in a repeated-measures experiment in which each participant completed five separate sessions. One session served as a baseline control with no virtual reality exposure. In the remaining four, participants viewed VR videos known to provoke VIMS. During those VR sessions, magnetic vestibular stimulation was delivered at three different intensities, set at 90 percent, 100 percent and 110 percent of each individual’s resting motor threshold, a standard reference measure in brain stimulation research that personalizes the stimulation strength to the participant’s own nervous system. Anchoring the intensities to the resting motor threshold, typically measured by observing responses in hand muscles to transcranial magnetic stimulation, ensured that every participant received comparable relative doses despite natural variation in neural excitability between individuals.

To quantify how sick participants felt, the researchers used the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, a widely adopted instrument that yields a total score along with subscores for nausea, oculomotor strain and disorientation. Questionnaires were administered before and after each session, allowing the team to compute symptom changes attributable to each experimental condition. In parallel, the researchers recorded resting-state electroencephalography after every session and analyzed the data using brain functional network analysis across multiple EEG frequency bands. This approach goes beyond simple power measurements, treating the brain as a network of interacting regions and computing parameters that describe how strongly and how efficiently those regions communicate at rest, from the slow delta and theta rhythms through alpha and beta up into the faster gamma range.

The symptom data told a strikingly non-linear story. Compared with VR exposure alone, stimulation at 110 percent of resting motor threshold was associated with a more favorable symptom profile on the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, with participants reporting reduced sickness overall. Stimulation at 90 percent, however, showed the opposite pattern: it was associated with aggravated symptoms, leaving participants feeling worse than they did after VR alone. The intermediate 100 percent condition fell between these extremes. In other words, magnetic vestibular stimulation was not simply good or bad for motion sickness; its effect hinged critically on dose, with stronger stimulation appearing protective and weaker stimulation apparently compounding the sensory conflict rather than resolving it.

The EEG network analysis added a neurophysiological dimension to these behavioral findings. Although the authors describe these network results as exploratory, they observed session-related differences in functional network characteristics across multiple frequency bands. Notably, the patterns recorded after the 110 percent stimulation sessions generally resembled the baseline condition more closely than the patterns seen after VR exposure alone or with lower-intensity stimulation. This suggests that high-intensity magnetic stimulation may have helped the brain’s resting network organization recover toward its normal configuration after the disruptive VR experience, hinting that the subjective symptom relief tracked measurable changes in large-scale brain dynamics. Differences appeared in networks spanning several frequency ranges, consistent with the idea that vestibular input propagates widely through cortical and subcortical circuits that govern spatial orientation, autonomic responses and arousal.

The authors are careful to frame these conclusions within the limits of the study. The sample was small, consisting of twenty healthy young adults, and the network-level EEG findings are exploratory rather than definitive. The researchers explicitly state that their findings should be confirmed in larger studies before any clinical or consumer applications are pursued. Individual differences in inner-ear anatomy, the orientation of the labyrinth relative to the applied field, and personal susceptibility to motion sickness are all known to modulate responses to magnetic vestibular stimulation, and these variables would need systematic attention in follow-up work. The protocol also involved repeated sessions, and the authors’ funding came from the CAS Superconducting Research Project and the Hebei Natural Science Foundation, reflecting the superconducting magnet technology underlying the stimulation approach.

Even with those caveats, the implications are considerable. If the dose-dependence holds up in larger trials, the study points toward a design principle rather than a single fix: vestibular stimulation for motion sickness must be calibrated individually, and getting the dose wrong could actively harm the user experience. A future VR headset or clinical device might one day pair with a magnetic stimulation module that tunes intensity to a user’s resting motor threshold, offering a drug-free, non-invasive way to extend comfortable session times for training simulators, rehabilitation programs, telemedicine and entertainment. Beyond VR, the same principle could benefit passengers prone to seasickness or simulator sickness in aviation and driving simulation. The work also strengthens the scientific case that the vestibular system is a legitimate and tractable target for magnetic neuromodulation, a field that has matured from the serendipitous observation of MRI-induced dizziness into a quantitative discipline with dosing frameworks, personalized thresholds and objective neuroimaging endpoints. For the millions of would-be VR users who currently abandon headsets within minutes, that progression carries real promise: the sensory conflict behind their discomfort may soon be something engineers can measure, model and magnetically quiet.

Subject of Research: The dose-dependent regulatory effect of magnetic vestibular stimulation on visually induced motion sickness and resting-state EEG networks in virtual reality users

Article Title: Study on the regulatory effect of magnetic vestibular stimulation on visually induced motion sickness

Article References: Geng, Y., Li, X., Li, Y., Zhai, X., & Xu, G. (2026). Study on the regulatory effect of magnetic vestibular stimulation on visually induced motion sickness. Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-026-03666-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11517-026-03666-1

Keywords: magnetic vestibular stimulation, visually induced motion sickness, virtual reality, EEG functional networks, Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, resting motor threshold, vestibular system, brain stimulation, cybersickness, neuromodulation, regulatory, effect

Researchers at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, recruited 162 university students and immersed them in a virtual jewelry museum built in Unity, viewed through an HTC Vive Pro 2 head-mounted display. The setting was chosen deliberately. Italian museums frequently display small, fragile artefacts such as rings, pendants, brooches and coins behind sealed glass, objects visitors can see but never touch. A virtual jewelry museum is therefore an ecologically valid testbed for asking whether haptic feedback and embodied walking genuinely enrich exploration of artefacts that are otherwise off-limits.

Each participant explored the museum under four conditions in a within-subjects, counterbalanced design. In the baseline configuration, they navigated with a controller and manipulated objects with a controller. In the other three, the researchers swapped in SenseGlove Nova haptic gloves, which deliver up to 20 newtons of force feedback to four fingers by braking cables routed along the back of the hand, a KATWalk Mini-S omnidirectional treadmill that lets users walk in place on a low-friction surface held centered by a waist harness, or both devices simultaneously. Finger position was sampled at 60 hertz with sub-millimeter resolution, and every session began with a calibration and familiarization phase so results would reflect settled use rather than initial learning.

The team measured four pillars of user experience after each condition: presence, the sensation of genuinely being inside the virtual world, assessed with the Igroup Presence Questionnaire; usability, scored with the System Usability Scale; cognitive workload, captured repeatedly with the Instantaneous Self-Assessment scale; and cybersickness, tracked with the Fast Motion Sickness scale. Because every participant completed all four configurations, the data were analyzed with linear mixed-effects models that included a random intercept per participant and Bonferroni-corrected p-values across all twelve statistical tests.

The results dismantle the idea that advanced interfaces uniformly enhance the experience. Haptic gloves significantly reduced perceived usability, with a coefficient of minus 3.59 points on the usability scale compared with controllers, and significantly increased cognitive workload, with a coefficient of 0.23 and a medium effect size of Cohen’s d equal to 0.542, the most practically meaningful effect in the study. Treadmill locomotion, by contrast, significantly reduced cognitive workload, with a coefficient of minus 0.36, suggesting that once users adapt, body-based navigation relies on more automatic sensorimotor routines and frees mental resources compared with controller-mediated movement.

The most surprising finding concerned presence. Neither the gloves nor the treadmill shifted presence on its own, but their combination did, and in the wrong direction: participants wearing haptic gloves while walking on the treadmill reported significantly lower perceived presence than in any other configuration, with a significant interaction effect of beta minus 0.17. The researchers interpret this as a possible ‘coupling cost’: when both locomotion and manipulation are physically and attentively demanding at the same time, small inconsistencies in tracking, latency or action-feedback coupling become more salient, eroding the subjective sense of ‘being there’ even though neither device alone moves the needle.

Observations during testing supported the statistics. Participants needed only a brief adaptation to the treadmill before navigating with relative ease, consistent with the workload benefit. The gloves, however, occasionally misaligned tracked hand positions with actual movements, prompting users to consciously monitor and correct their gestures, while the physical bulk of the devices added discomfort and mental strain. Notably, cybersickness remained low across all conditions, with average Fast Motion Sickness scores between roughly 2 and 3 on a 0-to-20 scale, and neither device, alone or combined, significantly changed sickness levels, though the authors caution that a floor effect may have limited sensitivity here.

The practical implications for museum designers are concrete. Force-feedback gloves should not be treated as a default upgrade; they make sense mainly when tactile manipulation of small or fragile artefacts is the core of the experience, and only with adequate onboarding, calibration support and simplified interaction gestures. Treadmill locomotion can meaningfully ease the cognitive burden of navigation and suits installations where embodied exploration is central, but its space, cost, safety and accessibility demands make it more appropriate for supervised, high-end deployments than everyday museum floors. For novice visitors, controller-based interaction and navigation remain the most robust baseline, and locomotion and manipulation should be co-designed rather than bolted together independently.

The broader message reaches beyond cultural heritage. This study, published in Multimedia Tools and Applications, is among the first to systematically test the individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion within a single experimental protocol, showing that findings from studying devices in isolation do not automatically transfer to combined high-embodiment configurations. The relationship between immersion and experience quality appears non-linear: accurate hand tracking, fluid gesture execution and low interaction overhead may matter more to visitors than haptic realism itself. As museums and other industries weigh investments in ever-more-embodied VR, the evidence suggests the right question is not how much immersion can be added, but which trade-offs in usability, mental effort and comfort each addition actually buys.

Subject of Research: The individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and VR treadmill locomotion on presence, usability, cognitive workload and cybersickness in virtual museum experiences

Article Title: More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums

Article References: Agostinelli, T., Gambelli Fenili, E., & Mengoni, M. (2026). More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 85(9), Article 754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-026-21911-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11042-026-21911-5

Keywords: virtual reality, haptic gloves, VR treadmill, virtual museums, presence, usability, cognitive workload, cybersickness, cultural heritage, user experience, immersive technology, locomotion