Evaluating discrete viewpoint control to reduce cybersickness in virtual reality
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Evaluating discrete viewpoint control to reduce cybersickness in virtual reality Yasin Farmani1 · Robert J. Teather2 Received: 27 March 2019 / Accepted: 2 January 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Cybersickness in virtual reality (VR) is an ongoing problem, despite recent advances in head-mounted displays (HMDs). Discrete viewpoint control techniques have been recently used by some VR developers to combat cybersickness. Discrete viewpoint techniques rely on reducing optic flow via inconsistent displacement, to reduce cybersickness when using stationary HMD-based VR systems. However, reports of their effectiveness are mostly anecdotal. We experimentally evaluate two discrete movement techniques; we refer to as rotation snapping and translation snapping. We conducted two experiments measuring participant cybersickness levels via the widely used simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ), as well as userreported levels of nausea, presence, and objective error rates. Our results indicate that both rotation snapping and translation snapping significantly reduced SSQ by 40% for rotational viewpoint movement, and 50% for translational viewpoint movement. They also reduced participant nausea levels, especially with longer VR exposure. Presence levels, error rates, and performance were not significantly affected by either technique. Keywords Virtual reality · Vection · Cybersickness · Visually induced motion sickness
1 Introduction Low-cost head-mounted displays (HMDs) and tracking solutions have made virtual reality (VR) more accessible than ever. VR has long been used in many application areas such as health care, entertainment, and scientific visualization (LaViola 2000; Bowman and Mcmahan 2007). Game companies are developing VR versions of console and PC games, such as Serious Sam VR (developed by Croteam1) and Resident Evil 7 (developed by CAPCOM2). The most notable benefit of VR is its immersive quality, which helps induce a sense of presence—the psychological phenomenon of feeling as though you are in the virtual place (SanchezVives and Slater 2005).
* Yasin Farmani [email protected] Robert J. Teather [email protected] 1
School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
2
Due to the recent widespread adoption of VR, the longstanding problem of cybersickness is an increasingly important issue (LaViola 2000; Davis et al. 2014). This is due, in part, to the potentially long VR exposures gamers may be willing to subject themselves to experience this new form of gaming. Moreover, controller-based virtual movement (e.g., via a joystick) while the user is stationary is commonly used in games. Yet, this mismatches virtual and physical motion; as will be discussed in depth below, such mismatches yield notably worse cybersickness than walking systems (e.g., the HTC Vive). Hardware improvements have reduced the impact of several technical factors that contribute
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