\nIt happened to me when I was new to VR and had just played Boneworks for hours. Looking down at my body, my hands didn\u2019t feel like they belonged to me. I was trying to grab a knife and fork for dinner and that required a huge concentrated effort, where I was staring at my hands. \u2013 @Edward1370<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nAfter my first session with Gorilla Tag. Movement felt strange, like my legs weren\u2019t there. Surreal experience, loved it. \u2013 @greenlig<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nIn the early days I used DK1 on my Mac and there was a crazy latency. After using it for 2 hours my brain fully adapted to the latency. Taking off the headset was surreal. It was as if the real world had \u201ctracking\u201d issues. \ud83d\ude05 \u2013 @robinhuse<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nIt\u2019s only happened to me once. After I wore the vision pro for around 24 hours. Super weird feeling, but fascinating as well. \u2013 @RoberJALA<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nIn a sense yes, but more so I went upstairs to eat after a longer VR session when I first got the Quest 1 in 2019 and I stopped myself suddenly because I thought my boundary lines were going to show up. Then I realized I was irl. \u2013 @OpalStar3<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI played 2 hours of Walkabout Mini Golf just before going to a real Mini Golf course with my friends. Standing on the hole gave me a weird feeling that I was in the game. It did also help me to comfortably win. It was strange though. My eyes kept pixelating the course. \u2013 @TheNeoism<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nYeah, my hands felt fake for a couple of days but it passed pretty quick, like the brain adapted to the perspective change. \u2013 @OneMoreBenjamin<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nIt happens from time to time, where things feels \u201coff\u201d when I\u2019m out of VR, like the body feels sluggish, not my own or out of place for a while. \u2013 @KathielRayna<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Many struggle to articulate the feeling, but clear themes emerge: an altered perception\u2014a vague sense that the real world, or their own body, doesn\u2019t seem quite as \u2018real\u2019 as usual.<\/p>\n
The phenomenon may be rare, but it\u2019s certainly real. Fortunately it\u2019s also temporary, as far as we can tell.<\/p>\n
The primary cause of feeling \u2018stuck in VR\u2019 relates to proprioception. Proprioception is your brain\u2019s model of where your body is in space. The model is essentially an intuition that\u2019s constructed through visual and tactile feedback. And it can be thought of as a \u2018real-time\u2019 model that\u2019s constantly updating itself as new feedback is observed.<\/p>\n
The proprioceptive model lets you close your eyes and still touch your nose, elbows, or knees with high accuracy. You maintain a remarkably precise sense of your body relative to itself and the world, even with no visual feedback.<\/p>\n
VR headsets might be incredibly good at convincing us that we\u2019re standing in another reality, but the simulation is imperfect.<\/p>\n
Consider VR motion controllers: they track quickly and accurately, yet there is always some latency and inaccuracy. Many experiences even manipulate controller position deliberately to boost immersion.<\/p>\n
These inaccuracies (inherent or intentional) tend to fluctuate throughout the course of using the headset, but they are largely hidden because instead of seeing your real hands, you only see your virtual hands. And since your brain perceives the virtual hands as your own, it starts to incorporate the inaccuracies into its proprioceptive model.<\/p>\n
For instance, if you\u2019ve ever played Beat Saber, you\u2019ll know it\u2019s a high-motion game that requires accurately swinging your hands to cut blocks. If you play the game on a system with twice the latency of another headset, you\u2019d expect to be thrown off; however, with practice most people compensate as the brain updates its model to match the imperfect world it sees.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t limited to controllers. Headsets themselves also have imperfect tracking and a certain degree of latency. That can cause your brain to think that turning your head just takes a little longer than you\u2019re used to.<\/p>\n
Or consider the case of a VR game that makes you one foot taller than you are in real life. And what about a game that makes your arms twice as long as normal? At first it would feel very strange and it would be hard to accurately grab things.<\/p>\n
With enough time, your brain feels as if you really are that tall\u2014or that your arms are that long\u2014because that\u2019s the reality you see inside the headset. Your brain incorporates the new information in order to make you feel \u2018normal\u2019.<\/p>\n
Then, when removing the headset, the very same thing happens. Your brain gets new feedback (ie: you\u2019re a different height and your arms are different length than when you were in virtual reality). So now the real you (and by extension, the real world) feel \u2018weird\u2019, until you get used to the real world again.<\/p>\n
If your arms felt longer a moment ago, your sense of reaching may suddenly feel shorter than expected, forcing more conscious effort to grasp objects\u2014like snagging a coffee cup from the peripheral vision\u2014making the real world feel slightly off.. like somehow you\u2019re still in VR.<\/p>\n
I tend to call this weird feeling (as it pertains to perception and VR) \u2018proprioceptive-disconnect\u2019, and it\u2019s the root of the feeling of \u2018being stuck in VR\u2019. The broader phenomenon that this sensation falls under is called depersonalization-derealization disorder, though it is not exclusive to VR.<\/p>\n
Ironically, this feeling of \u2018being stuck in VR\u2019 after removing the headset comes from a combination of modern headsets being able to fool our visual system so effectively, while at the same time still having imperfections like tracking latency and inaccuracy. We also have the impressive ability of our brains to adapt to new feedback to thank.<\/p>\n
Fortunately the feeling of proprioceptive-disconnect is temporary and generally fades away in an hour or two. Some people are more sensitive to this feeling, and whether or not it will happen to you can equally depend on the capabilities of the VR hardware you are using, and even the specific VR game or app you\u2019re using.<\/p>\n
Note:<\/strong> For completeness it\u2019s worth mentioning that there are other factors which can contribute to the feeling of being \u2018stuck in VR\u2019 after taking off a headset; two major ones are mismatched IPD setting of the headset (leading to a change in the sense of scale) and the vergence-accommodation conflict (an eye-related artifact caused by modern VR headsets lacking varifocal displays).<\/p>\n
Researchers have actually studied and quantified the phenomenon of VR-related proprioceptive-disconnect.<\/p>\n
A new paper from researchers at the University of Chicago called\u00a0VR Side-Effects: Memory & Proprioceptive Discrepancies After Leaving Virtual Reality<\/a>\u00a0explores the lingering effects of using VR headsets, which they call \u201cside-effects\u201d of using VR.<\/p>\n
\nOur brain\u2019s plasticity rapidly adapts our senses in VR, a phenomenon leveraged by techniques such as redirected walking, hand redirection, etc. However, while most of HCI is interested in how users adapt to VR, we turn our attention to how users need to adapt their senses when returning to the real-world. We report cases where, even after leaving VR, users experience unintended, lingering side-effects: distortions in proprioception or memory that may pose safety or usability risks.<\/p>\n
To investigate, we conducted two studies examining (1) proprioceptive side-effects from altered hand movements (retargeting), and (2) memory distortions arising from\u00a0spatial mismatches between the virtual and real-world locations of the same object.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In one part of the study, the researchers intentionally exaggerated the position of the hand-tracking (unbeknownst to the subjects of the experiments), a common technique used in VR design called hand retargeting. After the users removed the headset they were asked to perform pointing tasks, which allowed the researchers to quantify how the use of VR impacted the users\u2019 real-life motions after removing the headset.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that, \u201cafter leaving VR, participants\u2019 hands remained [inaccurate in pointing tasks] by up to 2.75 inches (7 cm), indicating residual proprioceptive distortion.\u201d<\/p>\n
In another part of the study, the researchers showed that peripheral awareness of a virtual environment could alter a person\u2019s memory of that environment.<\/p>\n
For this experiment the researchers placed a handful of objects in a room, including a seemingly irrelevant fire extinguisher that was placed off to the side. The researchers cleverly began the experiment by asking the subjects to collect a number of pre-positioned balls in the room, which gave the subjects a peripheral awareness of the seemingly irrelevant objects in the room.<\/p>\n
Then the subjects were placed in a VR headset which showed a virtual replica of the room. But in the virtual replica, some of the objects were altered (unbeknownst to the subjects); for instance, the position of the fire extinguisher was moved to the other side of the room.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/room-recreation-640x186.jpg\")
<\/a>The virtual recreation of the study room was almost identical, but with some objects intentionally repositioned | Image courtesy Antonin Cheymol & Pedro Lopes<\/p>\n