Minimizing cyber sickness in head mounted display systems: design guidelines and applications

TL;DR

This paper discusses causes of cyber sickness in VR headsets, proposes design guidelines including a dynamic focus solution based on visual attention heuristics, and demonstrates their application in a case study to reduce discomfort.

Contribution

It introduces a set of design guidelines and a real-time dynamic focus solution to mitigate cyber sickness in immersive VR environments, especially during first-person navigation.

Findings

The dynamic focus solution reduces user discomfort in VR.

Design guidelines improve user experience and decrease sickness symptoms.

Case study demonstrates practical application of proposed methods.

Abstract

We are experiencing an upcoming trend of using head mounted display systems in games and serious games, which is likely to become an established practice in the near future. While these systems provide highly immersive experiences, many users have been reporting discomfort symptoms, such as nausea, sickness, and headaches, among others. When using VR for health applications, this is more critical, since the discomfort may interfere a lot in treatments. In this work we discuss possible causes of these issues, and present possible solutions as design guidelines that may mitigate them. In this context, we go deeper within a dynamic focus solution to reduce discomfort in immersive virtual environments, when using first-person navigation. This solution applies an heuristic model of visual attention that works in real time. This work also discusses a case study (as a first-person spatial shooter demo) that applies this solution and the proposed design guidelines.