A comprehensive study of the affective and physiological responses induced by dynamic virtual reality environments

Abstract

Previous studies showed that virtual reality (VR) environments can affect emotional state and cause significant changes in physiological responses. Aside from these effects, inadvertently induced cybersickness is a notorious problem faced in VR. In this study, to further investigate the effects of virtual environments (VEs) with different context, three dynamic VEs were created. Each VE had a particular purpose: evoking no emotion in Campfire (CF), unpleasant emotions in Hospital (HH), and cybersickness symptoms in Roller Coaster (RC). We made use of objective measurements of physiological responses such as pupil dilation, blinks, fixations, saccades, and heart rate, as well as subjective self‐assessments via pre‐ and post‐VE session questionnaires. While previous studies investigate different subsets of these measures, our study makes a comprehensive analysis of them jointly in dynamic VEs. The results of the study indicate that cybersickness produced higher saccade mean speed, whereas unpleasant context caused higher fixation count, saccade rate, and pupil dilation. Moreover, CF decreased anxiety, whereas HH and RC increased it and they also decreased comfort. Participants felt cybersickness in all VEs even in CF which is designed to minimize the effects.

Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality: An Empirical Evaluation

“…This study can be considered as the first attempt to understand and expand the body of knowledge in this field. Therefore, purposefully, like other studies of VR [42], a suite of virtual environments with distinct contexts, were created to spot any relationship. The scope of this research was limited to pleasant and horror environment genres.…”

Floor-vibration VR: Mitigating Cybersickness Using Whole-body Tactile Stimuli in Highly Realistic Vehicle Driving Experiences

“…Our work with pupil size is an experimental evaluation of the possible utility of pupil size as a response to cybersickness. Previous studies have suggested the changes of pupil size are promising indicators of subjects' emotion [5]. But, since our study does not attempt to change subjects' emotions, if pupil size changes are observed, we will need to test whether the changes are correlated with cybersickness.…”

“…Previous research has shown that symptoms of cybersickness are associated with changes in physiological measures such as heart rate, skin conductance, respiration rate, eye-blink rate, gastric tachyarrhythmia, etc. Kim et al and Cebeci et al systematically studied these changes [5,26]. The results showed that the severity of cybersickness had a significant positive correlation with heart rate, eye-blink rate, gastric tachyarrhythmia, and EEG delta waves, and a negative correlation with EEG beta waves.…”

Eye Thought You Were Sick! Exploring Eye Behaviors for Cybersickness Detection in VR

“…Blink rate has often been associated with negative human behaviours such as stress and fatigue [Lee et al 2010]. Furthermore, empirical studies have also suggested that changes in blink rate can also be a reliable measure for eyestrain [Cebeci et al 2019;Kim et al 2005]. Given that eye fatigue is one of the core symptoms of the SSQ [Kennedy et al 1993] it makes sense to explore this factor as a potential variable for cybersickness detection [Iskander et al 2018].…”