Vection and Simulator Sickness

Abstract

Simulator sickness has been identified as a form of motion sickness in which users of simulators exhibit symptoms characteristic of true motion sickness. In a fixed-base simulator, visual and vestibular sources of information specifying dynamic orientation are in conflict to the extent that the optical flow pattern viewed by the pilot creates a compelling illusion of self-motion, which is not corroborated by the inertial forces transmitted through the vestibular sense organs. Visually induced illusory self-motion is known as vection, and a strict interpretation of sensory conflict theory of motion sickness suggests that vection in a fixed-base simulator would be a necessary precondition for simulator sickness. Direct confirmation of this relation is reported in this article.

Controlling Visually Induced Self-Motion Perception: Effect of Overlapping Dynamic Visual Noise

“…Vection is a phenomenon in which visual signals indicating self-motion overcome vestibular signals indicating no selfmotion. Therefore, vection and simulator sickness must be closely related phenomena (Hettinger et al, 1990;Hettinger and Riccio, 1992;Lee et al, 1997;Smart et al, 2002). Although it is not clear whether vection is a cause of simulator sickness or not, it is possible that conditions that suppress (enhance) vection also suppress (enhance) motion sickness.…”

Vection and cybersickness generated by head-and-display motion in the Oculus Rift

“…One factor often associated with the occurrence of cybersickness when wearing HMDs is vection [11,[24][25][26][27][28][29]. However, there has been surprisingly little systematic examination of vection using HMDs (and even less research examining both vection and motion sickness with HMDs).…”

Correlating Visual Scene Elements with Simulator Sickness Incidence: Hardware and Software Development.

“…It appears that our video recordings are very effective in capturing visual display data in the field and that our global approach to analysis may also be quite effective. For example, because the magnitude of the vection (self-motion perception) experienced can be expected to be predictive of the magnitude of the sickness (Hettinger, Berbaum, Kennedy, Dunlap, & Nolan, 1990), we needed some method to assess vection from the visual display. We initially focused on the 20 degrees of visual angle at the center of the display as this encompasses most fixations.…”

“…Additional visual features under investigation include visual display area with relative motion (parallax) of visual elements, average rate of these motions, and density of elements participating in the motion. These elements, taken together, should provide an integrated aggregate of the vection stimulus (perception of apparent self-motion) which has been implicated as a primary factor (cf., Hettinger et al, 1990) in simulator sickness (particularly in fixed-base simulators).…”