Reducing Motion Sickness Resulting From Movement inside Virtual Reality Environments

Abstract

Motion sickness while using virtual reality (VR) headsets affects 25-40% of users. Motion sickness results from a disconnect between the user's physical movement and their experienced movement in the virtual environment. The problem of how to move and navigate in a virtual environment that is larger than the user's physical environment is a well-studied problem. This project implements the three most common movement methods (teleportation, on-rails and free movement) and implements modifications to two of those methods (a natural acceleration and deceleration motion to on-rails and acceleration/inertiabased movement to free movement). The goal of this project is to find whether the modifications will decrease motion sickness and increase preferability compared to their conventional counterparts when tested in a user study. Users experienced lower nausea with our novel on-rails movement method combined with acceleration/deceleration than with any other method. This method was also preferred evenly with teleportation, the method most commonly used by developers now. This study indicates that on-rails should be given more attention as a viable solution to the virtual reality movement problem.