How Visual Motion Cues Can Influence Sickness For In-Car VR

Abstract

This paper explores the use of VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) in-car and in-motion for the first time. Immersive HMDs are becoming everyday consumer items and, as they offer new possibilities for entertainment and productivity, people will want to use them during travel in, for example, autonomous cars. However, their use is confounded by motion sickness caused in-part by the restricted visual perception of motion conflicting with physically perceived vehicle motion (accelerations/rotations detected by the vestibular system). Whilst VR HMDs restrict visual perception of motion, they could also render it virtually, potentially alleviating sensory conflict. To study this problem, we conducted the first on-road and in motion study to systematically investigate the effects of various visual presentations of the real-world motion of a car on the sickness and immersion of VR HMD wearing passengers. We established new baselines for VR in-car motion sickness, and found that there is no one best presentation with respect to balancing sickness and immersion. Instead, user preferences suggest different solutions are required for differently susceptible users to provide usable VR in-car. This work provides formative insights for VR designers and an entry point for further research into enabling use of VR HMDs, and the rich experiences they offer, when travelling.

Expanding the Bounds of Seated Virtual Workspaces

“…Doing so can reduce the physical requirements of using a given size of display space, and expand the available display space given a physical range to work within, taking into account physical capabilities, ergonomics, and the current environment and tasks. Moreover, such control could be applied to any VR or AR headset with rotational tracking, and could potentially improve productivity when seated at a desk or in physically restricted environments such as planes or cars [38,69,117]. Given headsets such as the Varjo VR-2 [108] (which combines a high-resolution center panel for focused detailed work with a lower resolution panel for peripheral vision) and the Microsoft Hololens 2 [73] (with resolution catching up with consumer VR headsets) it is becoming increasingly feasible to conduct text-heavy work in both VR and AR.…”

User Monitoring in Autonomous Driving System Using Gamified Task: A Case for VR/AR In-Car Gaming

“…Another paper [19] employed VR to an actual moving car with rendered underwater scenarios meant to offer a restful/mindful driving experience, while [20] used a similar moving vehicle with a VR system to render a flying (helicopter) environment with shootable game objects. One foreseeable challenge that is bound to affect the driver, who becomes the new passenger in ADS, is motion sickness [21,22]. An in-car game can remedy this by optimally synchronizing the experiences in the moving car and experienced content.…”

Sensory Alignment in Immersive Entertainment

“…This gives potential for the presentation of visual cues that are in conflict with real-world visual cues. For example, we could present a real world view of the peripheral activity around the user, whilst presenting 3d content with inconsistent motion in the central field; this is similar to the approach used by McGill et al in car passenger VR, which overlaid visual sensations in a game with visual sensations of real-world car motion [39]. One interesting factor here is that this work represents a within sense misalignment, that is we are not considering misalignment of two distinct senses such as visual and touch, rather misaligning cues within a single sense.…”