Automatic Prediction of Cybersickness for Virtual Reality Games

Abstract

Cybersickness, which is also called Virtual Reality (VR) sickness, poses a significant challenge to the VR user experience. Previous work demonstrated the viability of predicting cybersickness for VR 360°videos. Is it possible to automatically predict the level of cybersickness for interactive VR games? In this paper, we present a machine learning approach to automatically predict the level of cybersickness for VR games. First, we proposed a novel ranking-rating (RR) score to measure the ground-truth annotations for cybersickness. We then verified the RR scores by comparing them with the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) scores. Next, we extracted features from heterogeneous data sources including the VR visual input, the head movement, and the individual characteristics. Finally, we built three machine learning models and evaluated their performances: the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained from scratch, the Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN) trained from scratch, and the Support Vector Regression (SVR). The results indicated that the best performance of predicting cybersickness was obtained by the LSTM-RNN, providing a viable solution for automatically cybersickness prediction for interactive VR games.