Comfort & safety
Comfort Score
A comfort score is a per-session or per-scene indicator that estimates how physically comfortable users were, derived from head-motion patterns, locomotion choices and disengagement events.
Comfort scoring helps XR teams prioritise fixes that reduce motion sickness and fatigue. It is correlated with retention in long-form VR training and with completion rate in location-based VR.
A comfort score combines several inputs: high-frequency head yaw, unexpected locomotion vector changes, low-comfort teleport patterns and mid-session removal events. The result is a single, comparable number per scene so designers can prioritise which scenes to redesign first.
Why it matters
Comfort is the primary reason users take a headset off. In consumer VR it caps session length; in enterprise VR it caps training duration; in LBE it caps throughput. Without a comfort score, comfort issues are invisible until reviews mention motion sickness, at which point the release is public and the fix is expensive.
Example
A racing sim ships two locomotion modes. The comfort score for smooth locomotion is 42/100 in scene 4 (a tight banked turn); for teleport it is 79/100. The team keeps smooth locomotion but adds a comfort tunnel effect specifically to scene 4, lifting the smooth-mode score to 71/100.