If you're like me, the Oculus Rift might not be for you

I have tried the Oculus Rift, the long-awaited (and very expensive!) VR headset twice in the last couple of months.

And each time I've used it, I've come away feeling sick to my stomach. 

Both times I was playing immersive, first-person perspective games. It was an incredible experience, to be sure — unlike any other video game experience I've ever had.

But I had to stop playing and pull off the headset both times out of fear I'd lose my breakfast.

I'm not alone. My colleague Ben Gilbert, who has spent the last week pretty much immersed in the Oculus Rift, said that about 70% of people in our office who tried it reported some kind of nausea or headache while using it.

I was left feeling nauseous, similar to when I try to read a book or my iPhone when I'm a passenger in a car.

Another colleague, Dave Smith, who has tried VR dozens of times, was left feeling nauseous after wearing the headset for only a few seconds.

Business Insider's Alyson Shontell summed it up quite well, tweeting that VR left her feeling "a lil woozy."

—Alyson Shontell (@ajs) March 28, 2016

My colleague Rebecca Harrington, who writes for Tech Insider's Science section, spoke to Marty Banks, a professor of optometry and vision science at the University of California, Berkeley, who explained why VR can make us feel this way. Banks said it comes down to something called the "vergence-accommodation conflict."  

Convergence is what happens when both of your eyes look at an image to prevent you from seeing double, and accommodation is what your eyes do to keep that image from looking blurry.

Banks says these two processes are linked in the brain so we can see the world around us properly. They have to work together in order to focus on images at different distances.

"On these displays, you have to break that linkage," he says. "You have to accommodate to one distance and converge to another distance. And we believe that need, to kind of break the normal coupling, is what leads to the discomfort."

Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, knows this is an issue for a number of people.

"Comfort has been a challenge for the VR industry and we have made huge progress in making VR comfortable for most people," Oculus said in a statement to Tech Insider. "Also, as developers become more comfortable creating content for VR, and leveraging the technology available to them, the overall experience will improve for users."

I should say, however, that not every VR experience has left me feeling like this. A relaxing fishing game, and a game of solitaire, both played on Samsung's Gear VR, left me feeling fine. They were both fully immersive, of course, but the difference is that they didn't involve me "moving around" a space. (It's not the device, though, because I've felt sick after playing an endless runner on Gear VR.)

I'm confident that Oculus and other VR devices will improve in this regard. And one day in the not too distant future I look forward to comfortably playing an immersive first-person game without worrying about losing my lunch.