Validate the Users’ Comfortable Level in the Virtual Reality Walkthrough Environment for Minimizing Motion Sickness

Abstract

Motion sickness is a common scenario for users when they are exposed to a virtual reality (VR) environment. It is due to the conflict that occurs in the brain that tells the user that they are moving in the environment, but the fact is that the user’s body is sitting still causing them to get symptoms of motion sickness like nausea and dizziness. Therefore, motion sickness has become one of the main reasons why users still do not prefer to use VR to enhance their productivity. Motion sickness can be overcome by increasing the user's comfort level of walkthrough in the VR environment. Meanwhile, a popular VR simulation which is widely used in many industries is a walkthrough in a VR environment at a certain speed. This paper is focused on presenting the result of walkthroughs in a VR environment using movement speed and based on frame rates performance and adopting the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model construct variables namely performance expectancy (PE) and effort expectancy (EE) to measure the user’s comfort level. A mobile VR, ‘VR Terrain’ application software was developed based on the proposed framework. The application software was tested by 30 users by moving around in a VR environment with 4 different movement speeds that were implemented into four colored gates using a head-mounted display (HMD). A descriptive and coefficient analysis was used to analyze all the data. The blue gate revealed the most comfortable, outperforming all other three gates. Overall, the most suitable speed to use for VR walkthrough is 4.0 km/h. The experiment result may be used to create a parameter for the VR developers to reduce the VR motion sickness effect in the future.