Reducing VR sickness in car (while moving in vehicle)

Simulator sickness is one of the main obstacle in enjoying VR contents such as VR games and Videos.

When it comes to moving in vehicle, this problem get worse. As self-driving vehicle is getting more closer to our world, It is necessary to mitigate sickness while moving.

 

Preceding mitigation of simulator sickness, we have to know the reason of it.

https://reminder-by-kwan.tistory.com/144

멀미의 원인 (motion, cyber, VR sickness)

As written in previous post(url above), sickness come from sensory mismatch and sickness from the combined effects by both vehicle/user and virtual motion. While moving, the vestibular sense perceives the actual user/vehicle motion in one direction, and the visual sense, apparent visual motion in another.

 

Figure 1 Difference between self-motion by virtual motion by VR simulator and real motion(Vehicle motion)

In figure 1, blue line is the difference between the real motion and virtual motion.

In general, there are only virtual motion in simulator which also is a big constrain for enjoying VR contents. However due to Vehicle there is another origin of feeling-motion which does not match with visual motion(self-motion generated by vision).

 

There are few ways to make sickness level lower

First method is to generate the virtual contents which match the vehicle movement. Such as synchronized car, aircrafts Rollercoaster etc.

Another method is lowering FOV enough to give less information of self-moving in virtual reality or mixing real-road video on the outside of FOV.

Last method is to generate dots, segments or any others contents to zero out the difference between virtual motion and real motion.

 

By adding the difference flow, the total visual motion equates that of the actual motion and the sensory mismatch and sickness is reduced. We present the system for computing and visualizing the difference flow and validate our approach through a small initial pilot field experiment. Although not statistically significant due to the low number of subjects, results are promising, with substantial observed effect in reducing the sickness level.

 

But there are few problem of all these methods.

First method significantly restrict the type of contents which means there should be in car dependent contents. which makes Video imposible at all.

Second and third method interfere immersion by blocking, transforming the contents.

 

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9757521

Adding Difference Flow between Virtual and Actual Motion to Reduce Sensory Mismatch and VR Sickness while Moving