BalanceVR: Balance Training to Increase Tolerance to Cybersickness in Immersive Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This study investigates how balance training in virtual reality can enhance users' tolerance to cybersickness, showing that immersive VR balance training is more effective than non-immersive methods.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that balance training in immersive VR improves cybersickness tolerance more than exposure alone, highlighting the importance of balance training for VR usability.

Findings

Balance training improves balance performance.

Balance training increases cybersickness tolerance.

Immersive VR training is more effective than non-immersive methods.

Abstract

Cybersickness is a serious usability problem in virtual reality. Postural (or balance) instability theory has emerged as one of the major hypotheses for the cause of cybersickness. In this paper, we conducted a two-week-long experiment to observe the trends in user balance learning and sickness tolerance under different experimental conditions to analyze the potential inter-relationship between them. The experimental results have shown, aside from the obvious improvement in balance performance itself, that accompanying balance training had a stronger effect of increasing tolerance to cybersickness than mere exposure to VR. In addition, training in immersive VR was found to be more effective than using the 2D-based non-immersive medium, especially for the transfer effect to other non-training VR content.