How to Deal with Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality

Abstract

In this paper we present a exploratory study on the physiological responses when experiencing motion sickness in Virtual Reality (VR). To this end, we developed a VR application that can induce motion sickness. Using it, an experiment was performed where a group of users were subject to different types of observable motions, and for each the reported sensations together with a set of bio-signals were registered. The analysis of the collected results enable us to establish a relationship between VR/Motion sickness and the principal elements that may cause it, as well as the existence of some correlation between the discomfort felt by the participants and detectable changes in measurable physiological data. These results can serve both as a guide to designing VR-based applications, complementing the existing ones, and to enable the development of automatically adaptable ones preventing or reducing the discomfort for the users of this type of technology.