A Review of Electrostimulation-based Cybersickness Mitigations

With the development of consumer virtual reality (VR), people have increasing opportunities to experience cybersickness (CS) –- a kind of visuallyinduced motion sickness (MS). In view of the importance of CS mitigation (CSM), this paper reviews the methods of electrostimulation-based CSM (e-CSM), broadly categorised as either “VR-centric” or “Human-centric”. “VR-centric” refers to approaches where knowledge regarding the visual motion being experienced in VR directly affects how the neurostimulation is delivered, whereas “Human-centric” approaches focus on the inhibition or enhancement of human functions per se without knowledge of the experienced visual motion. We DIFFERENT E-found that 1) most e-CSM approaches are based on visual-vestibular sensory conflict theory –- one of the generally-accepted aetiologies of MS, 2) the majority of eCSM approaches are vestibular system-centric, either stimulating it to compensate for the mismatched vestibular sensory responses, or inhibiting it to make an artificial and temporary dysfunction in vestibular sensory organs or cortical areas, 3) Vestibular sensory organbased solutions are able to mitigate CS with immediate effect, while the real-time effect of vestibular cortical areas-based methods remains unclear, due to limited public data, 4) Based on subjective assessment, VRcentric approaches could relieve all three kinds of symptoms (nausea, oculomotor, and disorientation), which appears superior to the human-centric ones that could only alleviate one of the symptom types or just have an overall relief effect. Finally, we propose promising future research directions in the development of e-CSM.