Cybersickness

Abstract

Complaints such as headache, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, sweating, drowsiness, eyestrain, blurred vision, and vertigo are the typical signs of motion sickness, which has a long history and different theories of its causes. However, all these complaints resulting from what people have been through in psychical realities have now turned into the problems they experience in simulators and virtual reality (VR) as a result of the technological development. The studies on the health-related effects of the VR applications that have become widespread in ranging from education to medicine, from industry to scientific researches, and from entertaining market to video game market are gradually increasing. The reason of this increase is that the abovementioned issue constitutes one of the most significant health and security problems that could affect the development of VR technology. As of the early 1990s, the reports documenting the psychophysiological effects and aftereffects of being in VEs, that is to say, cybersickness, have started to emerge. The ones who have developed the VE technology refer to a big research pool consisting of a lot of studies that have been conducted on "human factor in VE's" for years to get the information they need to understand which kinds of technical and design changes are required to satisfy users' needs without exposing them to negative effects. As a contribution to those studies, the aim of this study is, in accordance with uses and effects approach, to determine the negative effects resulted from the VR experience on the users, and to find out the factors related with those effects.