Abstract:
According to sensory conflict theory, discrepancies between visual and vestibular senses
give rise to cyber sickness. This research scrutinizes whether coupling visual stimuli
to inertial stimuli in a VR environment reduces virtually induced motion sickness. A
virtual flight simulation environment coupled to a 2 DoF motion platform was used to
provide vestibular cues to supplement visual pitch and roll from a head-mounted display
(HMD). The flight simulation setup was able to generate ∓16◦ and ∓17◦ of the moment
along roll and pitch respectively. A traditional simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ)
was used as a motion sickness measurement index. Two conditions were tested: visual
stimulus only, and visual-vestibular sensory information. Subjective user feedback was
statistically analyzed under six different ratios of the visual-vestibular sensory interface.
Results elicit that the overall score of cybersickness decreases in a visual-vestibular
environment, and virtually induced motion sickness is proportional to the measure of
variance between the ratios of visual and vestibular signals. In a comparison of subjective
scores of SSQ sub-categories, nausea contributed less to motion sickness as compared to
oculomotor and disorientation, resulting in a motion profile of the order: Disorientation
> Oculomotor > Nausea. The findings of the study are expected to be used to analyze
slew rate ranges of flight simulators and VR glasses and to measure simulator sickness
in a VR environment.
