VR Sickness Benchmark System

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By rose rouhani, narmada umatheva, jannik brockerhoff, behrang keshavarz, ernst kruijff, jan gugenheimer & bernhard riecke

Tackling VR Sickness: A Novel Benchmark System for Assessing Contributing Factors and Mitigation Strategies through Rapid VR Sickness Induction and Recovery

Abstract

This research intro­duces a novel VR sick­ness bench­mark system, designed to address the lack of stan­dard­ized tools for assess­ing and mit­i­gat­ing VR sick­ness. It aims to rec­tify the incon­sis­ten­cies and lim­i­ta­tions preva­lent in exist­ing VR sick­ness assess­ment and mit­i­ga­tion meth­ods, thereby facil­i­tat­ing more effec­tive and com­pa­ra­ble cross-study analyses.

This bench­mark system, cre­ated using Unity 3D, fea­tures two dis­tinct VR envi­ron­ments, small and large, designed as figure-eight racing tracks through roller-coaster-like move­ments. Key design ele­ments to induce VR sick­ness includ vary­ing speeds, direc­tional changes, ele­va­tion shifts. pas­sive par­tic­i­pant move­ment, and enhanced optic flow with visual ele­ments. The system also includes an in-VR sick­ness rating tool for real-time feedback.

Our research stud­ies aim to eval­u­ate the effec­tive­ness of four com­monly dis­cus­sion VR sick­ness mit­i­ga­tion tech­niques in the envi­ron­ments, aimed at (1) val­i­dat­ing the bench­mark system’s capa­bil­ity to induce and reduce VR sick­ness in a con­trolled manner, ensur­ing tem­po­rary, man­age­able symp­toms with rapid recov­ery times. This aspect is cru­cial for eth­i­cal research con­duct and par­tic­i­pant safety; and (2) sys­tem­at­i­cally eval­u­at­ing and com­par­ing dif­fer­ent VR sick­ness mit­i­ga­tion tech­niques, con­tribut­ing to stan­dard­iz­ing VR sick­ness assess­ment and enhanc­ing the reli­a­bil­ity and com­pa­ra­bil­ity of VR research. The bench­mark system’s adapt­abil­ity across var­i­ous research dimen­sions makes it a valu­able tool for VR devel­op­ers and researchers, enabling effi­cient test­ing of a wide range of para­me­ters and design iterations.

This project is part of Rose Rouhani’s MSc thesis, here’s Rose pre­sent­ing on the VR Sickness Benchmark Project:

Videos of the small and large envi­ron­ments, with the VR sick­ness mit­i­ga­tion tech­niques imple­mented in each can be found in this YouTube playlist. Below is one exam­ple for the Dynamic FOV reduc­tion method, all of them are listed on our YouTube playlist.

 

Publications

Rouhani, Rose, Narmada Umatheva, Jannik Brockerhoff, Behrang Keshavarz, Ernst Kruijff, Jan Gugenheimer, and Bernhard E. Riecke. 2024. “Towards Benchmarking VR Sickness: A Novel Methodological Framework for Assessing Contributing Factors and Mitigation Strategies through Rapid VR Sickness Induction and Recovery.” Displays 84 (August):102807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2024.102807. (Download)

Preprints

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4790891

Rouhani, R., Umatheva, N., Brockerhoff, J., Keshavarz, B., Kruijff, E., Gugenheimer, J., & Riecke, B. E. (2024). Tackling VR Sickness: A Novel Benchmark System for Assessing Contributing Factors and Mitigation Strategies Through Rapid VR Sickness Induction and Recovery (SSRN Scholarly Paper (Preprint) 4790891). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4790891

Visuals of the benchmark

Overview of small environment:

small env overview 1

Overview of large environment:

large env overview 1

In-VR sick­ness per­cent­age scale: 
sickness score interface 1

Participant during study:

participant 1

 

Open source Unity code of the VR Sickness Benchmark

We just pub­lished a freely avail­able open sources Unity ver­sion of the VR Sickness Benchmark on GitHub here: https://github.com/BernhardRiecke/VRSickness_Benchmark — please reach out to Rose and Bernhard if anything’s unclear, you’d like to col­lab­o­rate on using or fur­ther improv­ing the bench­mark, get access to some of our data col­lected etc.

We’re cur­rently work­ing on an active loco­mo­tion ver­sion of the bench­mark system, as well as data analy­sis scripts, that we hope to add soon.

Overview of VR sick­ness bench­mark Unity project — this is the main overview you’ll need for using and adapt­ing the the bench­mark. It explains the key com­po­nents of the project, includ­ing the code on Github and the set­tings essen­tial for research. Watch to under­stand how to set up the envi­ron­ment, manage motion sick­ness reduc­tion tech­niques, and export data for analy­sis.

 

Overview of this Unity nausea score script. This is one of the most impor­tant scripts in this project which you would most likely be work­ing with espe­cially if you would like to change any­thing in your output files for this project.

 

Overview of the Unity script used for cre­at­ing the figure 8 loco­mo­tion pattern.