As consumers begin to get their hands on the first wave of virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, which is now shipping, they might also find themselves dealing with headaches and nausea from the motion effects of VR.

But we're talking about technology here—if it can revolutionize healthcare, surely it can offer a remedy for an affliction it caused itself. Indeed, the Mayo Clinic may have found an answer to VR sickness: galvanic vestibular stimulation.

Despite its mouthful of a name, GVS is built on a simple principle. The nausea that some people feel when wearing VR headsets is the result of a synchronization problem: the motion you're seeing on the screen often lags behind the movement of your body. So GVS uses sensors on your forehead, neck, and ears to tell the VR software exactly where your head is positioned at all times.

The Mayo clinic announced this week that it licensed the GVS technology to a Los Angeles-based VR entertainment company called Vmocion, as reported by Fast Company. So far it's just an idea, since no hardware or software makers have signed up yet. But another form of the technology has been used in the U.S. military for years to eliminate fighter pilots' motion sickness while using training simulators.

"Our research has proven that GVS can mitigate simulator sickness among pilots," Michael Cevette, co-director of the Mayo Clinic lab that developed the technology, said in a statement. "What makes this technology unique is that we have found a way to synchronize the inner ear stimulation with what people see visually on a movie screen or a gaming device, so they actually can feel the motion that they are seeing in real time."

Among the handful of times I've donned VR headsets, I only noticed a slight nausea feeling once, while I was testing the Sony PlayStation VR. To alleviate this sickness and improve the visual experience, Sony says all games and other applications written for PlayStation VR must be able to sustain frame rates of 60fps or better.

That's a low number, though; Mozilla is targeting at least 90fps for its WebVR technology. And Vmocion believes that even 90fps won't completely solve the motion sickness problem, according to Fast Company. So it's pushing ahead with the GVS technology, and hopes to offer it to developers and hardware manufacturers soon.