Richard H.Y. So Human Performance and Virtual Reality Laboratory Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR email@example.com
Cybersickness refers to the sickness phenomenon associated with the use of virtual reality systems. When a user views a wide field-of-view moving scene inside a virtual environment, an illusion of self-motion (vection) in the opposite direction can occur and the experience can be nauseogenic. This paper presents the initial development of a Cybersickness Dose Value (CSDV) and explores how this CSDV can be used to predict the severity of cybersickness.
A virtual reality (VR) system enables a user to interact with a computergenerated 'virtual' environment ( Furness and Barfield, 1995) and is useful in operator training applications (e.g., driving simulation: Bayarriet al., 1996; flight simulation: Haas, 1984; equipment simulation: Linet al., 1996). However, symptoms of motion sickness (e.g., nausea and headache) have been reported among users who navigate through a virtual simulation for 20 minutes or longer (e.g., passive navigation: So, 1994; active navigation: Regan, 1995; Finch and Howarth, 1996; Stanney and Kennedy, 1997, 1998; Kolasinski and Gilson, 1998; Draper, 1998). Some studies reported sickness occurrence even after 10 minutes of exposure (e.g., Wilsonet al., 1997). This type of sickness has been referred to as 'eybersickness' ( McCarley and Sharkey, 1992) and its occurrence has hindered the widespread applications of VR simulators. A review of literature indicates that cybersickness has been the subject of many studies (see Table 1). The results of these studies have provided a body of