Minimizing cyber sickness in head mounted display systems: design guidelines and applications
This addresses discomfort issues for users of VR systems, particularly in health applications, but is incremental as it builds on existing guidelines with a specific solution.
The paper tackles the problem of cyber sickness in head-mounted display systems by proposing design guidelines and a dynamic focus solution based on a heuristic model of visual attention, applied in a case study to reduce discomfort in immersive virtual environments.
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.