I’ve noticed, and I’m sure others have, that in a movie where there is a lot of handheld camera use, that you can feel a little queasy at the end of it. Which is what I felt today after the end of “The Constant Gardner”. (I enjoyed it BTW.)
I’ve noticed that this effect, for me, only happens when I see a movie in a theater. It doesn’t happen at home.
Is that an effect of the large screen and essentially not looking away while with TV I would be looking at a smaller image and be more distracted visually?
The generally accepted theory of motion sickness is that it is caused by dissonance between visually sensed motion and your sense of equilibrium.
Either your eyes are telling you that you’re moving and your vestibular system is saying “nuh-uh!” (as with a large format film) or your vestibular system is telling you that you’re moving and your eyes are saying “nuh-uh!” (as in a cabin in ship, where everything appears stationary relative to your body.)
To avoid motion sickness, you want to make these two systems agree as much as possible with what they are reporting to you. If it’s a common problem for you at the movies, sit further back, so that your visual field is registering as much of the theatre as possible. “I’m sitting still, and all these people in front of me are sitting still, the walls are still, etc.” This should fix you right up.
The reason that the TV doesn’t make you motion sick is because you are seeing it in the context of the rest of your living-room. There’s much less room for dissonance between what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling.
When I would play Everquest (or any other first-person game, especially Carmagedon) in full screen mode, after about about half an hour I would get queasy and slightly headachy. I solved this by shrinking down the view screen in the game. This left a black area around the game area where I could put interface items, but it also reduced how much of my field of vision was in motion. This change would allow me to play EQ for hours and hours (and hours and hours and hours, somedays) without feeling like crap.