posted on 2025-05-10, 13:20authored byShamus 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