Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality: An Empirical Evaluation

Umer Asghar Chattha,Tahir Mustafa Madni,Fozia Anwar,Muhammad Faisal Cheema,Uzair Iqbal Janjua,Sana Iqbal Janjua

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3007076

Umer Asghar Chattha, Tahir Mustafa Madni + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.3007076

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Abstract

Due to rapid growth in Virtual Reality (VR) technology, the industry of VR is expected to grow around $26.89 billion by 2022. However, with its extensive growth and immersive inclusion in human life, health-related issues are reported including, but not limited to nauseated feeling, vomiting, dizziness and cold sweats. These issues introduce a well-known side effect termed as motion sickness in VR users. Consequently, motion sickness limits the VR community in the full adaptation of this immersive technology. Since there is no lack of literature investigating motion sickness caused by VR, yet researches on the effect of VR on human's physiology is still in its infancy. This study presents novel findings, by comparing different factors such as gender, motion sickness experience, 3D games experience and VR experience. Furthermore, it reports the impact of concerning factors in a within-subjects design (46 participants participated in an experiment) under different virtual environment genres. The key findings of this article report that there is a significant difference in the amount of motion sickness when shifting from pleasant to the horror genre of the environment and having a strong dependence on gender. Moreover, the type of virtual environment is an essential factor that has a notable effect on the user's blood pressure, blood sugar and heart rate. However, past experiences with motion sickness and 3D games show no significant impact on the user's level of motion sickness.

Highlights

Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-simulated experience that mimics various physical surroundings to facilitate its users
VR technology generates a virtual environment by amplifying threedimensional characters, situations or objects, which altogether increase the realistic sensation of this technology
The statistics show that Blood Pressure (BP), Heart Rate (HR) and Sugar Level (SL) for N = 46 participants was normally distributed, with skewness of ±1.05 and kurtosis of ±1.95, as shown in Table 2 and Table 3

Summary

Introduction

VR is a computer-simulated experience that mimics various physical surroundings to facilitate its users. To provide best VR experiences, the virtual environments are developed in a way that replaces user’s cognition with computer-simulated sensations, i.e. contravening the users from the real world [1]. The most common and top of the line hardware devices that fully immerse users into virtual environments are the Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). Recent studies [7], [16], [22]–[28] have exposed multiple factors associated with motion sickness induced by VR systems. These factors include but are not limited to: gender differences, virtual environment genre, VR experiences, graphical properties, virtual environment illuminance and motion sickness experiences. The impact of motion sickness with the association of the aforementioned factors on the human physiological factors such as heart rate, blood pressure and sugar level were reported [7], [19], [20]

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