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Using optical flow as an objective metric of cybersickness in virtual environments

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conference contribution
posted on 2025-05-10, 13:20 authored by Shamus P. Smith, Karen Blackmore, Keith Nesbitt
Cybersickness can have a negative impact on user experience and may prove to be a significant barrier to the use of virtual reality. This issue is linked to the stationary user’s perception of self-motion. This problem may be amplified with the widespread uptake of affordable head-mounted displays. Assessing the likelihood of cybersickness for any new virtual experience typically requires human participants and is often measured through subjective user responses or physiological measures, for example skin conductance and heart rate. Unfortunately, these approaches can be time consuming, particularly when ethics approval, specialized equipment and dedicated lab experiments are required. This paper outlines an alternative approach to objectively quantify expected self-motion experiences, and the resulting cybersickness that might occur in a virtual environment. To evaluate the approach, optical flow metrics were gathered from two virtual environments and an approximate entropy measure calculated using time-series data of visual motion. This approach was able to distinguish between the two virtual environments with known cybersickness characteristics. Refining such objective measures of virtual experiences can help minimize negative effects of cybersickness, by allowing rapid and iterative evaluation of simulations before final testing and deployment.

History

Source title

Proceedings of the Australasian Simulation Congress 2017 (ASC 2017)

Name of conference

Australasian Simulation Congress 2017 (ASC 2017)

Location

Sydney

Start date

2017-08-28

End date

2017-08-31

Publisher

Simulation Australasia

Place published

Rundle Mall, S.A.

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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