A New Training Method for VR Sickness Reduction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a training method to reduce the VR sickness that occurs while viewing VR content with an HMD on. The proposed approach is a new method that involves pre-exposing users to VR sickness to enable them to adapt to VR sickness. In the proposed method, the training process was designed based on the features of existing studies related to exposure and adaptation to motion sickness and simulator sickness. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated through experiments with 15 subjects (SSQ and VR sickness response were used in the analysis). As a result of the experiment, nausea was significantly decreased by 47%, and oculomotor discomfort was significantly decreased by 34% after the proposed training method. The VR sickness response decreased by 31%; however, this difference was not statistically significant. Furthermore, we analyzed the VR sickness response in two groups: those whose sickness decreased and those whose sickness increased. We confirmed that the decrease group (pre-experiment mean: 1.34 times, post-experiment mean: 0.58 times) had a larger change than the increase group (pre-experiment mean: 0.31 times, post-experiment mean: 0.42 times). Therefore, from the experimental results, it was confirmed that the proposed method is effective in reducing VR sickness.