Virtual reality environment design of managing both presence and virtual reality sickness

Abstract

It is difficult to design the Virtual Reality (VR) Environment which controls VR sickness and promotes presence. This is because the relationship between the user's susceptibility to VR sickness and a sense of presence, determined by velocity and visual angle of the visual information, involves a trade-off between the two. Then we propose the optimal value search system which computes efficiently the velocity and visual angle which control VR sickness and do not impair presence by taking account of a subject's characteristic. Under certain experimental conditions, some subjects showed serious VR sickness whose simulator sickness questionnaire total score was more than 60 and needed more than 30 minutes to recover from VR sickness. However, on the condition of angular velocity and visual angle computed by our proposed method, all subjects felt their vection, which was our index for the sense of presence, over 70 percent of their experiment time; no subject needed more than 5 minutes to recover from VR sickness.