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.
Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays are continually gaining popularity in various fields such as education, military, entertainment, and health. Although such technologies provide a high sense of immersion, they can also trigger symptoms of discomfort. This condition is called cybersickness (CS) and is quite popular in recent virtual reality research. In this work we first present a review of the literature on theories of discomfort manifestations usually attributed to virtual reality environments. Following, we reviewed existing strategies aimed at minimizing CS problems and discussed how the CS measurement has been conducted based on subjective, biosignal (or objective), and users profile data. We also describe and discuss related works that are aiming to mitigate cybersickness problems using deep and symbolic machine learning approaches. Although some works used methods to make deep learning explainable, they are not strongly affirmed by literature. For this reason in this work we argue that symbolic classifiers can be a good way to identify CS causes, once they possibilities human-readability which is crucial for analyze the machine learning decision paths. In summary, from a total of 157 observed studies, 24 were excluded. Moreover, we believe that this work facilitates researchers to identify the leading causes for most discomfort situations in virtual reality environments, associate the most recommended strategies to minimize such discomfort, and explore different ways to conduct experiments involving machine learning to overcome cybersickness.
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