A review of cybersickness in head-mounted displays: raising attention to individual susceptibility

Abstract

Cybersickness still poses a significant challenge to the widespread usage of virtual reality, leading to different levels of discomfort and potentially breaking the immersive experience. Researchers have attempted to discover the possible fundamental causes of cybersickness for years. Despite the longstanding interest in the research field, inconsistent results have been drawn on the contributing factors and solutions to combating cybersickness. Moreover, little attention has been paid to individual susceptibility. A consolidated explanation remains under development, requiring more empirical studies with robust and reproducible methodologies. This review presents an integrated survey connecting the findings from previous review papers and the state of the art involving empirical studies and participants. A literature review is then presented, focusing on the practical studies of different contributing factors, the pros and cons of measurements, profiles of cybersickness, and solutions to reduce this phenomenon. Our findings suggest a lack of considerations regarding user susceptibility and gender balance in between groups studies. In addition, incongruities among empirical findings raised concerns. We conclude by suggesting points of insights for future empirical investigations.

Two sides of the same coin: accessibility practices and neurodivergent users' experience of extended reality

“…Additionally, previous research has investigated how neurotypical users could mitigate motion sickness in VR, such as through the physical hand-eye-coordination tasks, real-world natural decay and adding visual effects or elements (Dennison and Krum, 2019;Jasper et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2022). However, no study tested the efficacy of these techniques for neurodivergent users.…”

“…However, as highlighted in the study by Das et al (2021), compound effects on neurodivergent users are likely to be different from the ones experienced by neurotypical users due to increased sensitivity to inducing factors. Additionally, previous research has investigated how neurotypical users could mitigate motion sickness in VR, such as through the physical hand-eye-coordination tasks, real-world natural decay and adding visual effects or elements (Dennison and Krum, 2019;Jasper et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2022). However, no study tested the efficacy of these techniques for neurodivergent users.…”

Sensory Reweighting: A Common Mechanism for Subjective Visual Vertical and Cybersickness Susceptibility

“…For the SVV, gender differences have been previously reported in which females are more likely to be influenced by the orientation of a visual background when upright [Barnett-Cowan et al, 2010] and mixed results have been found with expert observers, where dancers were found to be more susceptible to the vestibular noise generated by head tilts (Beck et al, 2020) and astronauts performed no different than a control group on earth (Harris et al, 2017). Recent reviews have also highlighted various factors related to individual, hardware, content, and experimental paradigm differences leading to the vast differences observed for susceptibility to cybersickness in the literature (Howard and Van Zandt, 2021; Tian et al, 2022).…”

Towards the Effects of Alignment Edits on the Quality of Experience of 360 Videos

“…Real-time edits introduce opportunities for customized optimizations. For instance, adaptively supporting accommodation of people susceptible to cybersickness [45], [46], or prone to diverge from a pre-designed storyline (individuals with low reaction time [47]). Furthermore, they also enable system optimizations, e.g., expanding the efficacy of streaming applications.…”

“…It is known that the interaction between visual and vestibular systems triggers self-motion, for example, in flying scenes or when a virtual object crosses the viewport [56]. [46] extensively investigated visually induced motion sickness. [57] measured just noticeable differences in the head lateral shifts, showing that it is possible to implement real-time optimizations based on content parameters, specifically object distances, that would lead to an imperceptible translation gain.…”