Vertical Display Oscillation Effects on Forward Vection and Simulator Sickness

Abstract

Our findings appear to represent a special case in visual self-motion perception where high-frequency vertical oscillation both enhances vection and increases simulator sickness when it is incorporated into an optic flow display simulating constant velocity self-motion in depth.

Effects of gaze on vection from jittering, oscillating, and purely radial optic flow

“…We have recently shown that this type of oscillating display induces OFRs when viewed freely (Kim & Palmisano, 2008). In different trials, participants viewpoint oscillation (i.e., periodic, low-frequency simulated horizontal/vertical head perturbations) also improves the vection in depth induced by radial flow in a fashion that is remarkably similar to that for this simulated viewpoint jitter, despite marked differences in the expected visual-vestibular conflicts in these two situations (Kim & Palmisano, 2008;Palmisano, Allison, & Pekin, 2008;Palmisano, Bonato, Bubka, & Folder, 2007).…”

Vection and cybersickness generated by head-and-display motion in the Oculus Rift

“…Early findings (using fixed-based simulators rather than HMDs) suggested that traditional vection might be a prerequisite for visually induced motion sickness in stationary observers [25]. However, while fixed-base simulator studies have often reported positive correlations between vection and visually induced motion sickness [14,[31][32][33], other studies appeared to suggest negative relationships between the two phenomena [34], and still others failed to find significant relationships between them [4,28,[35][36][37].…”

Compelling Self-Motion Through Virtual Environments Without Actual Self-Motion – Using Self-Motion Illusions ('Vection') to Improve VR User Experience

“…Increasing the perceived rigidity of a vection-inducing stimulus seems, however, not to be the only mechanism underlying the vection-facilitating effect of stimulus jitter, as the effect can also be observed for naturalistic stimuli, which are arguably readily perceived as inherently rigid: Using videos of translations along a hallway, Bubka & Bonato (2010) showed that adding image oscillations induced by walking motions considerably enhanced linear forward vection strength while reducing vection onset latencies. Similar facilitation of forward linear vection when including slow viewpoint oscillations has been reported for more abstract optic flow displays (Palmisano et al, 2007). Surprisingly, it did not matter whether the viewpoint oscillations were caused by active head oscillations or just passively viewed without any head motions (Kim & Palmisano, 2008).…”

“…The occurrence of vection can, for example, correlate with undesirable side-effects like motion sickness or motion after-effects. It is, however, still unclear whether or how vection might be causally related to motion sickness, as vection generally seems to occur when visuo-vestibular cue conflicts are small, whereas motion sickness tends to occur for larger cue conflicts (Kennedy et al, 2003;Palmisano et al, 2007). Moreover, visually-induced motion sickness can occur without either vection or optokinetic nystagmus (Ji, So, & Cheung, 2009).…”

“…Surprisingly, it did not matter whether the viewpoint oscillations were caused by active head oscillations or just passively viewed without any head motions (Kim & Palmisano, 2008). While it is tempting to suggest to add coherent image jitter or oscillations to VR simulations in order to enhance self-motion perception and perceptual realism, this should be carefully evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as adding image jitter/oscillations has also been shown to increases motion sickness (Palmisano et al, 2007), likely due to the increased sensory conflict between visual and non-visual cues.…”