Virtual Reality Sickness and its Impact on the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Training

Abstract

Today's fully immersive VR systems are struggling with the phenomenon of so-called "VR sickness". VR sickness represents a subtype of cybersickness that has been induced specifically by VR technology such as the CAVE or HMD headset. The essence of current VR systems is to allow an individual to move in a virtual space, with little or no real movement. Movement in the virtual environment is achieved by relatively small body movements, but mostly through teleportation from place to place, or by using buttons and analogy joysticks on the controller. Thus, it can be assumed that the primary agent of the state of nausea here is not motion, but the illusion of motion.

The individual symptoms of VR sickness can manifest in a person in the form of fatigue, blurred vision, headache, upset stomach and rapid breathing, which may escalate in the final stages to severe nausea, disorientation or vertigo and vomiting. The dominant symptom here is disorientation and motor problems, which may be followed by feelings of nausea, upset stomach or vomiting, and only lastly by symptoms associated with visual or ocular disturbance.

Again, there are factors associated with the overarching categories of "sickness", which for the sake of generality will be summarised for now as: healthy and biological predispositions, VR technology used, time and experience.

A popular methodology for measuring and recording cybersickness is in the form of the so-called "Simulator sickness questionnaire". A form for recording subjective statements from subjects who have undergone a VR experience, and from whose responses an SSQ score is calculated indicating the severity of cybersickness.

However, previous studies and measurements on the topic of cybersickness and VR sickness have revealed other manifestations that can be objectively measured and the progression of VR sickness in an individual can be recorded in real time, such as heart rate, cortisol, pupil dilation or elecrodermal activity.

The presented paper presents the actual research design and the basic measurement results for two ready-made applications designed for an industrial enterprise, where in the case of the first application conventional training occurs, but in the case of the second application, an environment for the occurrence of VR sickness is created in its introduction by accelerated movement of a forklift and the effect of the given on the error rate is observed. At the same time, the aspects and objective characteristics that influence the occurrence of virtual sickness are monitored using standardized tools. The aim is to obtain data for effective prevention of these aspects in the virtual reality environment.

This paper presents the research carried out and the measurement results.