Effects of Linear Visual-Vestibular Conflict on Presence, Perceived Scene Stability and Cybersickness in the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest

Abstract

Humans rely on multiple senses to perceive their self-motion in the real world. For example, a sideways linear head translation can be sensed either by lamellar optic flow of the visual scene projected on the retina of the eye or by stimulation of vestibular hair cell receptors found in the otolith macula of the inner ear. Mismatches in visual and vestibular information can induce cybersickness during head-mounted display (HMD) based virtual reality (VR). In this pilot study, participants were immersed in a virtual environment using two recent consumer-grade HMDs: the Oculus Go (3DOF angular only head tracking) and the Oculus Quest (6DOF angular and linear head tracking). On each trial they generated horizontal linear head oscillations along the interaural axis at a rate of 0.5 Hz. This head movement should generate greater sensory conflict when viewing the virtual environment on the Oculus Go (compared to the Quest) due to the absence of linear tracking. We found that perceived scene instability always increased with the degree of linear visual-vestibular conflict. However, cybersickness was not experienced by 7/14 participants, but was experienced by the remaining participants in at least one of the stereoscopic viewing conditions (six of whom also reported cybersickness in monoscopic viewing conditions). No statistical difference in spatial presence was found across conditions, suggesting that participants could tolerate considerable scene instability while retaining the feeling of being there in the virtual environment. Levels of perceived scene instability, spatial presence and cybersickness were found to be similar between the Oculus Go and the Oculus Quest with linear tracking disabled. The limited effect of linear coupling on cybersickness, compared with its strong effect on perceived scene instability, suggests that perceived scene instability may not always be associated with cybersickness. However, perceived scene instability does appear to provide explanatory power over the cybersickness observed in stereoscopic viewing conditions.

Simplified Virtual Reality System Can Be Used to Evaluate the Temporal Discrimination Ability in Softball Batting as in the Real Environment

“…The cause of cybersickness is commonly postulated to be a mismatch between the sensory input presented within the VR (e.g., visual input) and the sensory input from the external environment (e.g., vestibular input), or postural instability (Rebenitsch and Owen, 2016 ). However, the cybersickness seems to be technically being solved in the newer generation of HMDs, and the Oculus Quest2 used in this study generally meets the specs that are supposed to reduce the onset of cybersickness (Kourtesis et al, 2019 ; Kim et al, 2021 ). Indeed, in our questionnaire, the overall score for the questions about cybersickness was positive.…”

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“…Secondly, regarding the tracking requirements, some devices have 3DOF, allowing the user to look around 360° in a sphere-like motion, such as Google’s cardboard, while other headsets have 6DOF, allowing the user to also move in X, Y, and Z like the HTC Vive. In other words, some interactions are better suited when they enable the user to look and move around, while others can only depend on head tracking [ 37 ]. Third is the weight of the headset since some interactions can take a couple of minutes, while rehabilitation applications usually take over 30 min, resulting in rejection from the user and reducing immersion.…”

“…Furthermore, it is lightweight, weighing only 468 g, which is very handy considering that the average RAGT is around 40 min. It has integrated speakers, which removes the necessity of using headphones and adding more devices on the user, and it does not induce much cybersickness [ 37 ].…”

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