Cyber sickness in low-immersive, semi-immersive, and fully immersive virtual reality

It is known that virtual reality (VR) experience may cause cyber sickness. One aspect of VR is an immersion or otherwise sense of presence, the sense of feeling oneself in a virtual world. In this paper an experiment which was conducted in order to find the link between level of immersion and cyber sickness felt by participants is presented. Eighty-nine participants aged between 19 and 36 years have been equally divided into four groups with different level of VR immersion. The low-immersive group was represented by PC with monoscopic screen, the semi-immersive group was represented by CAVE with stereoscopic projector, the fully immersive group was represented by VR head-mounted display, and the last group was the control group without any kind of immersion. The task for the participants was to navigate through the maze for a specified amount of time (10 min). The Simulator Sickness Questionnaire was used as a subjective measure tool for cyber sickness level and Grooved Pegboard Test for assessing the fine dexterity, both before and after the experiment. Regarding the time spend in VR the fully immersive environment had the biggest problems as more than half of the participants had to stop before 10 min (p < 0.001). Concerning the cyber sickness, the significant increase in nausea score between pre-test and post-test scores has been observed in semi-immersive group (p = 0.0018) and fully immersive group (p < 0.0001). The increase in oculomotor score was smaller. The significant difference was noted only in fully immersive group (p = 0.0449). In spite of great nausea factor after the VR immersion the participants did not show a decrease of fine dexterity in any group (p < 0.001).