Identifying Cybersickness When Wearing a Head-Mounted Display through Heart Rate Variability Data

Abstract

Cybersickness is one of the common problems related to Virtual Reality (VR). The symptoms are classified into three categories: Nausea, oculomotor, and disorientation. The purpose of this study is to identify cybersickness symptoms based on simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ) and physiological signal using heart rate variability (HRV) when wearing a head-mounted display. Fifteen participants performed a 15-min driving simulation task using head-mounted display. From the SSQ results, the most dominant category of cybersickness symptoms induced by participants are nausea and disorientation. The results showed a correlation between the nausea score and the high frequency (HF)/component of HRV (r=0.618, p=0.032) as well as the ratio of low and high frequency component (LF/HF) (r=-0.718, p=0.009). These findings confirm that the occurrence of nausea when wearing a head-mounted display is influenced by the activation of sympathetic nervous system.