The VR Effects Laboratory has been formed to explore the physiological and psychological effects of virtual interfaces on the users of this technology. Current research focuses on simulator sickness, adaptation, and presence.

Simulator sickness refers to a range of symptoms (among them nausea, dizziness,eye-strain and headaches) which may be induced by exposure to a simulation of an environment. Simulator sickness can be thought of as having two parts: motion sickness and interface sickness.

Motion sickness consists of those symptoms which would occur in a simulator even if the simulation was a perfect representation of an environment. For instance, a simulation of a boat ride might make one sick even if the simulation was perfect (including a full-fidelity motion platform). Here, the cues that provoke sickness come from the accurate simulation of a provocative environment.

Interface sickness consists of those symptoms which result from limitations of the simulator to accurately simulate an environment. Some symptoms are due to problems with the display itself (such as poor resolution or inter-ocular distance adjustment); others are due to the simulator support system (time lags, scale changes, position sensing inaccuracies). In either case, this lack of fidelity in the simulation of an environment may be the primary source of some sickness symptoms.

As technology improves, it is expected that the part of simulator sickness due to motion sickness will increase, and the part due to interface sickness will eventually decrease.

The HITL has an active program researching both interface sickness and motion sickness. Interface sickness research is investigating the effects of specific interface distortion (time delay, scale change, etc.) on physiological adaptations and on ratings of simulator sickness. The study of motion sickness is centered around visual manipulations which may reduce symptoms and on the potential prediction of sickness susceptibility.

Aside from alleviating simulator sickness, a second key problem facing the virtual environments community is the development of effective measures for the quality of virtual interfaces. As interfaces become more sophisticated, both the likelihood and the cost of design errors increases. To avoid such errors, we need to have good measures for the ability of an interface to intuitively convey meaning.

There is literature suggesting that "presence", the sense of "being in" a virtual environment, is related to both the intuitiveness of the interface and the meaningfulness of the information displayed. Hence, good measures for presence would be one means to evaluate the quality of an interface.

HITL researchers have put forward the hypothesis that presence in a virtual environment is related to a switch from using the real environment to define one's sense of position, orientation and motion to using the virtual environment to define these things. Hence, it may be possible to measure presence by examining the relative influence of conflicting real and virtual spatial cues on perception. HITL has an active research program in this area.