Cybersickness and Wellbeing in Immersive XR and AR

Immersive technologies, including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, collectively known as extended reality (XR), are moving rapidly from laboratories and specialist applications into training, industry, healthcare, education, and everyday consumer life. As head-mounted displays and augmented-reality glasses become lighter, cheaper, and more capable, people are spending longer and more frequent periods in immersive environments. This shift brings the physiological and cognitive costs of immersion into sharp focus. The nausea, disorientation, and oculomotor discomfort that many users experience, known as cybersickness, remains one of the most persistent barriers to comfortable, sustained XR use. It sits alongside visual fatigue arising from vergence-accommodation conflict, cognitive fatigue during prolonged tasks, and broader questions of comfort, accessibility, and wellbeing.Despite decades of research, the mechanisms and management of XR discomfort are still incompletely understood. Competing accounts, from sensory-conflict to postural-instability theories, capture different facets of cybersickness, yet reliable prediction at the level of the individual remains elusive. Susceptibility varies markedly with age, sex, prior experience, and sensory and vestibular differences, and the measures used across studies, from self-report questionnaires to neural and peripheral physiological signals, are rarely standardised or directly comparable. As XR use extends to longer sessions, repeated daily exposure, and safety- or health-critical contexts, questions of cumulative fatigue, aftereffects, real-world safety, and equitable access become pressing. Bridging controlled findings to naturalistic, long-term deployment, and translating them into hardware, content, and interaction designs that keep users comfortable, is a central challenge for neuroergonomics.This Research Topic aims to bring together work that advances the understanding, measurement, prediction, and mitigation of cybersickness, visual and cognitive fatigue, and wellbeing in immersive XR and AR. By spanning neural, physiological, perceptual, and behavioural perspectives, this collection seeks to clarify how immersion affects the user, who is most at risk, and how systems can be designed for comfortable, healthy, and inclusive long-term use.We welcome submissions presenting empirical studies, methodological advances, validation work, and critical reviews. Contributions that introduce neural or physiological markers, prediction and real-time detection methods, mitigation strategies, or design guidelines are encouraged, as are studies addressing individual differences, prolonged or repeated exposure, and ecological validity. Papers introducing openly available datasets, benchmarks, or reproducible protocols are particularly welcome.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Neural, physiological, and behavioural markers of cybersickness and visually induced motion sickness• Mechanisms of cybersickness, including sensory conflict, postural instability, and vestibular contributions• Visual fatigue and discomfort in XR, including vergence-accommodation conflict and see-through AR displays• Cognitive fatigue, mental workload, and attentional effects of prolonged or repeated immersion• Real-time detection and prediction of cybersickness from EEG, eye tracking, postural, and autonomic signals• Individual differences in susceptibility, including age, sex, sensory profile, and prior experience• Mitigation strategies through display design, rendering, field-of-view management, locomotion techniques, and rest frames• Adaptation, aftereffects, and the consequences of long-term and everyday XR and AR glasses use• Accessibility, inclusivity, and equity in the design of comfortable immersive experiences• Standardised measures, benchmarks, and reproducible protocols for assessing XR comfort and wellbeing• Ecological validity: from controlled studies to comfortable, safe deployment in training, clinical, industrial, and consumer settings Topic editors: Paolo Ceravolo, Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons, Wenge Xu Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83686/cybersickness-and-wellbeing-in-immersive-xr-and-ar