A Testbed for Studying Cybersickness and its Mitigation in Immersive Virtual Reality

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Virtual Reality Technology
• User Experience Research

Background:

• Cybersickness (CS) is a persistent challenge in virtual reality (VR) hindering user adoption and experience.
• Existing methods for mitigating CS lack standardized validation, complicating comparisons between different techniques.
• A common methodology is needed to reliably assess the effectiveness of VR cybersickness interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel testbed for studying and mitigating cybersickness in immersive virtual reality.
• To provide a standardized framework for evaluating the efficacy of cybersickness reduction strategies.
• To enable objective and subjective assessments of user experience in VR environments.

Main Methods:

• Development of a testbed featuring four virtual scenarios designed to predictably induce cybersickness.
• Integration of an experimental protocol utilizing standard questionnaires and objective performance metrics.
• Application of the testbed to evaluate a specific cybersickness mitigation technique against a no-mitigation baseline.

Main Results:

• The proposed testbed facilitates targeted elicitation of cybersickness.
• Objective user performance metrics can be extracted within the virtual scenarios.
• The testbed allows for comprehensive assessment of cybersickness levels and user experience.

Conclusions:

• The developed testbed offers a standardized and robust platform for researching virtual reality cybersickness.
• This methodology enables reliable comparison of different cybersickness mitigation techniques.
• The testbed contributes to advancing the development of more comfortable and immersive VR experiences.