Reductions in sickness with repeated exposure to HMD-based virtual reality appear to be game-specific

Abstract

While head-mounted display (HMD) based gaming is often limited by cybersickness, research suggests that repeated exposure to virtual reality (VR) can reduce the severity of these symptoms. This study was therefore aimed at: (1) examining the exposure conditions required to reduce cybersickness during HMD VR; and (2) learning whether such reductions generalise from one HMD VR game to another. Our participants played two commercially-available HMD VR video games over two consecutive days. Their first exposure to HMD VR on both days was always to a 15-min virtual rollercoaster ride. On Day 1, half of our participants also played a virtual climbing game for 15-min, while the rest of them finished testing early. Participants in the latter group were only exposed to the climbing game late on Day 2. We found that sickness was significantly reduced for our participants on their second exposure to the virtual rollercoaster. However, sickness to the rollercoaster on Day 2 was unaffected by whether they had played the climbing game on Day 1. Sickness during virtual climbing was also unaffected by group differences in exposure to the virtual rollercoaster. This convergent evidence suggested that the reductions in cybersickness produced by repeated exposure to HMD VR were game-specific. While these benefits did not generalise to the second game, two 15-min exposures to the same HMD VR game was sufficient to significantly reduce cybersickness in this study.