Floor-vibration VR: Mitigating Cybersickness Using Whole-body Tactile Stimuli in Highly Realistic Vehicle Driving Experiences

Abstract

This work addresses cybersickness, a major barrier to successful long-exposure immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences since user discomfort frequently leads to prematurely ending such experiences. Starting from sensory conflict theory, we posit that if a vibrating floor delivers vestibular stimuli that minimally match the vibration characteristics of a scenario, the size of the conflict between the visual and vestibular senses will be reduced and, thus, the incidence and/or severity of cybersickness will also be reduced. We integrated a custom-built, computer-controlled vibrating floor in our VR system. To evaluate the system, we implemented a realistic off-road vehicle driving simulator in which participants rode multiple laps as passengers on an off-road course. We programmed the floor to generate vertical vibrations similar to those experienced in real off-road vehicle travel. The scenario and driving conditions were designed to be cybersickness-inducing for users in both the Vibration and No-vibration conditions. We collected subjective and objective data for variables previously shown to be related to levels of cybersickness or presence. These included presence and simulator sickness questionnaires (SSQ), self-rated discomfort levels, and the physiological signals of heart rate, galvanic skin response (GSR), and pupil size. Comparing data between participants in the Vibration group (N=11) to the No-Vibration group (N=11), we found that Delta-SSQ Oculomotor response and the GSR physiological signal, both known to be positively correlated with cybersickness, were significantly lower (with large effect sizes) for the Vibration group. Other variables differed between groups in the same direction, but with trivial or small effect sizes. The results indicate that the floor vibration significantly reduced some measures of cybersickness.

Perspective: Does Realism Improve Presence in VR? Suggesting a Model and Metric for VR Experience Evaluation

“…In our own work, we have repeatedly reported higher preference responses for our multisensory VR systems compared to typical VR systems, regardless of the context, number of sensory channels, and level of fidelity, even though multisensory cues did not consistently lead to higher Presence (Jung et al, 2020;Jung et al, 2021b;Jung et al, 2021a). The reasons are still not clear to us, but participants reported they felt a stronger sense of Fun, Impressiveness and Involvement in multisensory VR, which are strongly related to emotional engagement in the given place, object, and maybe certain events too, which sounds a lot like Aura (MacIntyre et al, 2004).…”

“…In light of this perspective, adding more sensory channels should, theoretically, raise the level of immersion. For example, extending secondary feedback cues, such as floor or wearable vibration, wind, and olfactory stimuli that match the visual and audio stimuli, provides more immersion than a system with visual and audio only (Feng et al, 2015;Feng et al, 2016;Jung et al, 2020;Jung et al, 2021a;Jung et al, 2021b).…”

“…Physical simulation refers to the operational environment such as fully multisensory-enabled experience including visual, aural, tactile, olfaction, and taste stimuli. For example, (Feng et al, 2015;Feng et al, 2016) and (Jung et al, 2020;Jung et al, 2021a;Jung et al, 2021b) achieved a highly-realistic VR experience by using multisensory-cue-enabled VR platforms. Functional simulation is the fidelity of the behavioral representation by the operational equipment in reacting to the tasks executed by the user.…”

“…In line with this perspective, realness can be evaluated by, for example, the visual representation of the computer-generated world in terms of the number of triangles and the resolution of textures McDonnell et al (2012), Latoschik et al (2017), and enhanced auditory feedback such as spatialized audio (Naef et al, 2002). In addition, supporting the expected additional sensory channels in line with the context of the given VR experience, such as tactile, olfactory, and taste feedback, can increase the sense of realness (Feng et al, 2015;Feng et al, 2016;Jung et al, 2020;Jung et al, 2021a;Jung et al, 2021b).…”

“…However, they reported that increased visual realism did not. After 2 decades, Jung et al designed a system to deliver additional sensory feedback (vibration, wind, and olfactory cues) in multiple studies (Jung et al, 2020;Jung et al, 2021a;Jung et al, 2021b). In each of these cases, systems with multisensory cues can be seen as (objectively) more immersive.…”