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Very good advice Bill.  And that's why I repeat the whole thing below.
We also see this happening since we started using our fulldome system.
I keep running into people who tell me in advance that they can't take
being in a big-screen theater for various reasons.  However, I've also
noted that these same people seem to be administrators and people
we really need to get behind us in promoting our theater.  My joke is,
I figure the administrative types just don't get out much and they
probably live really boring lives. (g)

But as Bill says, the effect does seem very much related to how
much you have to move your eyes.

> Bill Watson wrote:
>> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
>> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
>> *****************************************************************************
>>
>> I don't know of any research specifically on motion sickness in giant-screen
>> movie theaters, but different theories about motion sickness suggest that in
>> "apparent motion" environments (i.e., those in which you don't actually move
>> but you feel like you do, like a giant-screen movie theater), two factors
>> (among others) associated with motion sickness are reflexive eye movements
>> and sensory conflict. Although I'm not an expert in this particular area, my
>> read of a summary of the research is that:
>>
>> 1) The more a person tries to move his/her eyes to "keep up" with a moving
>> (or virtually moving) environment, the more susceptible to motion sickness
>> he or she will become.
>>
>> 2) The greater the difference between the motion the person expects to
>> experience (actually or virtually) and what the person actually experiences,
>> the more susceptible to motion sickness he or she will become.
>>
>> You might imagine in a giant-screen environment a person trying to rapidly
>> move his/her eyes to make sense of visual signals (i.e., what's on the
>> screen) that he/she doesn't expect. In that case, both of these factors
>> would be operating, and a person prone to it might get pretty motion sick.
>>
>> So what does that say about where to sit? These are just guesses, but I'd
>> say the conventional wisdom (and direction) to "simply close your eyes and
>> the sensation will go away" is pretty sound, based on this research - if you
>> can't see the movement, you can't try to keep up with it. Also, I would
>> guess that the higher up you sit in a theater, the more of the whole screen
>> you can see, so the less rapidly your eyes have to move to keep up with the
>> action (smaller visual field) and the more likely the eyes will be to
>> interpret what's going on.
>>
>> I can send you the citation for an article if you need it or want to read
>> more.
>>
>> Bill
>>     


-- 


Clear DARK Skies,


Jack Dunn - Mueller Planetarium

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