The prediction, early detection, and mitigation of virtual reality motion sickness.
Continuous virtual locomotion is a common method for moving through a virtual environment without being constrained by the physical space like real walking or increasing users’ spatial disorientation like teleportation or snap turning, but it can potentially cause severe cybersickness. Cybersickness raises significant accessibility concerns as it discourages people from using VR, and prior research has also shown that it disproportionately affects women. Consequently, research into both the causes of and potential mitigation techniques for cybersickness has become increasingly important as the usage of virtual reality technologies continues to expand across a variety of application domains.
In VR, users’ virtual motions that can be inferred from artificial optical information that is decoupled from their physical movements relative to the Earth. Physical movements can change the gravito-inertial force vector and stimulate the vestibular system. When standing still on a flat surface, the GIF is always equal to gravity and cannot be changed effectively by current technologies like optical information. Such discrepancies can result from technical issues, such as system latency, or caused by the choice of locomotion interface, such as controller-based continuous virtual locomotion. The decoupled relationship between the optical and inertial information in a simulated environment like VR is commonly acknowledged as a major factor contributing to cybersickness. Several different methods for mitigating cybersickness have been proposed, such as dynamic field-of-view modification and static or dynamic rest frames. However, these methods modify display characteristics in the user’s visual field, often reducing the visibility of the virtual environment, which could have a potentially negative effect on the user’s subjective experience.