Balancing Exploration and Cybersickness: Investigating Curiosity-Driven Behavior in Virtual Environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how curiosity influences virtual navigation behavior, revealing that users balance exploration and cybersickness, with curiosity levels rising in changing environments, providing a quantitative model of this dynamic.

Contribution

It introduces a curiosity-based framework for understanding decision-making during virtual navigation, integrating the free energy principle to explain exploration versus discomfort.

Findings

Users tend to adopt conservative navigation strategies.

Most participants show negative curiosity across trials.

Curiosity increases when virtual environments change.

Abstract

During virtual navigation, users exhibit varied interaction and navigation behaviors influenced by several factors. Existing theories and models have been developed to explain and predict these diverse patterns. While users often experience uncomfortable sensations, such as cybersickness, during virtual reality (VR) use, they do not always make optimal decisions to mitigate these effects. Although methods like reinforcement learning have been used to model decision-making processes, they typically rely on random selection to simulate actions, failing to capture the complexities of real navigation behavior. In this study, we propose curiosity as a key factor driving irrational decision-making, suggesting that users continuously balance exploration and cybersickness according to the free energy principle during virtual navigation. Our findings show that VR users generally adopt conservative strategies when navigating, with most participants displaying negative curiosity across trials. However, curiosity levels tend to rise when the virtual environment changes, illustrating the dynamic interplay between exploration and discomfort. This study provides a quantitative approach to decoding curiosity-driven behavior during virtual navigation, offering insights into how users balance exploration and the avoidance of cybersickness. Future research will further refine this model by incorporating additional psychological and environmental factors to improve the accuracy of navigation pattern predictions.