The manner in which our faculties change while playing focused energy computer-generated reality games plays a basic part in understanding the reason why certain individuals experience extreme cybersickness and others don’t.
Cybersickness is a type of movement disorder that happens due to openness to vivid VR and increased use of virtual reality applications.
The subjective visual vertical, a measure of how people perceive the orientation of vertical lines, significantly changed after participants played a high-intensity VR game, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Waterloo.
Professor Michael Barnett-Cowan of the Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences stated, “Our findings suggest that the severity of a person’s cybersickness is affected by how our senses adjust to the conflict between reality and virtual reality.” This knowledge could be extremely useful for VR experience designers, allowing them to create environments that are more user-friendly and enjoyable.
“Our research indicates that a person’s degree of cybersickness is influenced by how their senses cope with the tension between reality and virtual reality.”
Michael Barnett-Cowan, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences.
The researchers gathered the data from 31 participants. Before and after playing two VR games, one high-intensity and one low-intensity, they looked at how they saw the vertical.
After experiencing VR, particularly at high intensity, those who experienced less sickness were more likely to experience the greatest change in the subjective visual vertical. On the other hand, people who were most susceptible to cybersickness were less likely to have altered their perception of vertical lines. Males and females, as well as participants with low and high gaming experience, did not differ significantly.
Co-author William Chung, a former doctoral student at Waterloo who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, stated, “While the subjective vertical visual task significantly predicted the severity of cybersickness symptoms, there is still much to be explained.”
“We can potentially develop personalized cybersickness mitigation strategies and VR experiences that take into account individual differences in sensory processing and hopefully lower the occurrence of cybersickness by understanding the relationship between sensory reweighting and cybersickness susceptibility.”
To ensure a positive user experience, it is essential to address the pervasive problem of cybersickness, which is characterized by symptoms such as nausea, disorientation, eye strain, and fatigue. As virtual reality continues to revolutionize gaming, education, and social interaction.
The findings have been published in the Virtual Reality journal.
More information: William Chung et al, Sensory reweighting: a common mechanism for subjective visual vertical and cybersickness susceptibility, Virtual Reality (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10055-023-00786-z
