Daniela Trevisan

Thiago Porcino, Esteban Clua, Daniela Trevisan et al.

Virtual reality (VR) is an imminent trend in games, education, entertainment, military, and health applications, as the use of head-mounted displays is becoming accessible to the mass market. Virtual reality provides immersive experiences but still does not offer an entirely perfect situation, mainly due to Cybersickness (CS) issues. In this work, we first present a detailed review about possible causes of CS. Following, we propose a novel CS prediction solution. Our system is able to suggest if the user may be entering in the next moments of the application into an illness situation. We use Random Forest classifiers, based on a dataset we have produced. The CSPQ (Cybersickness Profile Questionnaire) is also proposed, which is used to identify the player's susceptibility to CS and the dataset construction. In addition, we designed two immersive environments for empirical studies where participants are asked to complete the questionnaire and describe (orally) the degree of discomfort during their gaming experience. Our data was achieved through 84 individuals on different days, using VR devices. Our proposal also allows us to identify which are the most frequent attributes (causes) in the observed discomfort situations.

Thiago M. Porcino, Esteban W. Clua, Cristina N. Vasconcelos et al.

We are experiencing an upcoming trend of using head mounted display systems in games and serious games, which is likely to become an established practice in the near future. While these systems provide highly immersive experiences, many users have been reporting discomfort symptoms, such as nausea, sickness, and headaches, among others. When using VR for health applications, this is more critical, since the discomfort may interfere a lot in treatments. In this work we discuss possible causes of these issues, and present possible solutions as design guidelines that may mitigate them. In this context, we go deeper within a dynamic focus solution to reduce discomfort in immersive virtual environments, when using first-person navigation. This solution applies an heuristic model of visual attention that works in real time. This work also discusses a case study (as a first-person spatial shooter demo) that applies this solution and the proposed design guidelines.