Minimizing cyber sickness in head mounted display systems: Design guidelines and applications

Abstract

We are experiencing an upcoming trend of using head mounted display systems in games and serious games, which is likely to become an established practice in the near future. While these systems provide highly immersive experiences, many users have been reporting discomfort symptoms, such as nausea, sickness, and headaches, among others. When using VR for health applications, this is more critical, since the discomfort may interfere a lot in treatments. In this work we discuss possible causes of these issues, and present possible solutions as design guidelines that may mitigate them. In this context, we go deeper within a dynamic focus solution to reduce discomfort in immersive virtual environments, when using first-person navigation. This solution applies an heuristic model of visual attention that works in real time. This work also discusses a case study (as a first-person spatial shooter demo) that applies this solution and the proposed design guidelines.

Immersive virtual field trips in education: A mixed‐methods study on elementary students' presence and perceived learning

“…In addition, we could understand that the symptoms of cyber sickness (eg, nausea, dizziness or fatigue) were limited to a small number of students during immersive VFT experiences. According to previous studies, the degree of control during VR experiences with HMDs (Porcino, Clua, Trevisan, Vasconcelos, & Valente, 2017) and exposure duration (Kennedy, Stanney, & Dunlap, 2000) affect users' feeling of cyber sickness. In this study, the use of VR for less than ten minutes and students' control of views with HMDs corresponding to head movements helped minimize cyber sickness.…”

Guidelines for the Development of Immersive Virtual Reality Software for Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology: The Development of Virtual Reality Everyday Assessment Lab (VR-EAL), a Neuropsychological Test Battery in Immersive Virtual Reality

“…HTC Vive and Oculus Rift offer a play area of an acceptable size, which permits ecologically valid scenarios and interactions to be developed (Porcino et al, 2017;Borrego et al, 2018). However, the VR play area is restricted to the limits of the physical space and tracking area; hence, it does not allow navigation which is based on physically walking (Porcino et al, 2017;Borrego et al, 2018). A suitable solution is the implementation of a navigation system based on teleportation.…”

“…Teleportation enables navigation exceeding the boundaries of the VR play area and delivers highlevel immersion, a pleasant user experience, and decreases the frequency of VRISE. Typically, a navigation system of a VR software which depends on a touchpad, keyboard, or joystick, substantially increasing the frequency and intensity of VRISE (Bozgeyikli et al, 2016;Frommel et al, 2017;Porcino et al, 2017). In VR-EAL, a combination of teleportation and physical movement (i.e., free movement of the upper limbs and walking in a small-restricted area) is used (see Figures 1-3, 6).…”

HCI Lessons From PlayStation VR

“…The project is developing frameworks to facilitate the rapid development of VR-based Educational Environmental Narrative games (EENs) for PlayStation 4. The problem of motion sickness in player locomotion is well documented [1,7,11]. However, first-person perspective player locomotion is essential to Environmental Narrative games (e.g.…”

“…There is a significant body of academic literature on the topic of virtual reality locomotion which can be used to inform good design [1,4,7,11,14]. However, a body of commercial work also has the potential to inform good design.…”