Mitigating Visually Induced Motion Sickness: A Virtual Hand-Eye Coordination Task

Abstract

<p>Virtual reality has grown rapidly over the past decade, yet visually induced motion sickness (VIMS),continues to affect the usability of this technology. Aside from medicine, physical hand-eye-coordinationtasks have been found to be effective in mitigating symptoms of VIMS, however the need for equipmentoutside of virtual reality limits the usefulness of these mitigation techniques. In this study, 21 participantswere sickened via a virtual obstacle course and used one of two mitigation techniques. The first, naturaldecay, is simply waiting outside the virtual environment (VE) for symptoms to subside; the other was avirtual peg-in-hole task, performed in the VE with a gamepad. A paired samples t-test confirmed that thevirtual obstacle course induced VIMS. Both mitigation techniques significantly lessened the symptoms ofVIMS, but there were no significant differences in the effectiveness of mitigation between the twotechniques. A virtual mitigation method allowing continued immersion in a VE would pave the way forlong-term immersion virtual reality studies, involving topics such as vigilance or training.</p>