Investigating motion sickness techniques for immersive virtual environments

Abstract

Motion sickness is one of important issues in immersive virtual environments. In some cases it may last for hours after participation in the virtual experience. Reducing the amount of motion sickness in healthcare applications is of great importance. This paper is examining how motion sickness can be reduced in immersive virtual environments. Two visual methods were designed to assess how they could help to alleviate motion sickness. The first method is the presence of a frame of reference (in form of a cockpit and a radial) and the second method is the visible path (in form of waypoints in the virtual environment). Four testing groups were formed: two for each individual method, one combining both methods and one control group. Each group consisted of 15 healthy subjects. Results show that there is a pattern in the data favouring visual path as a better method against motion sickness compared to the frame of reference.