I Am The Passenger: How Visual Motion Cues Can Influence Sickness For In-Car VR

This paper explores the use of VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) in-car and in-motion for the first time. Immersive HMDs are becoming everyday consumer items and, as they offer new possibilities for entertainment and productivity, people will want to use them during travel in, for example, autonomous cars. However, their use is confounded by motion sickness caused in-part by the restricted visual perception of motion conflicting with physically perceived vehicle motion (accelerations/rotations detected by the vestibular system). Whilst VR HMDs restrict visual perception of motion, they could also render it virtually, potentially alleviating sensory conflict. To study this problem, we conducted the first on-road and in motion study to systematically investigate the effects of various visual presentations of the real-world motion of a car on the sickness and immersion of VR HMD wearing passengers. We established new baselines for VR in-car motion sickness, and found that there is no one best presentation with respect to balancing sickness and immersion. Instead, user preferences suggest different solutions are required for differently susceptible users to provide usable VR in-car. This work provides formative insights for VR designers and an entry point for further research into enabling use of VR HMDs, and the rich experiences they offer, when travelling

Mixed reality simulators

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Johannesburg, May 2017.Virtual Reality (VR) is widely used in training simulators of dangerous or expensive vehicles such as aircraft or heavy mining machinery. The vehicles often have very complicated controls that users need to master before attempting to operate a real world version of the machine. VR allows users to safely train in a simulated environment without the risk of injury or damaging expensive equipment in the field. VR however visually cuts off the user from the real environment,whichmayobtainobstructions. Usersareunabletosafelymoveorgesturewhilewearing aVRheadset. Additionallyusersareunabletousestandardinputdevicessuchasmiceandkeyboards. Bymixinginaliveviewofthetherealworld,theusercanstillseeandinteractwiththe physical environment. The contribution of this research is presenting ways of using Mixed RealitytoenhancetheuserexperienceoftraditionalVRbasedsimulators. MixedRealityimproves on traditional VR simulators by allowing the user the safety and freedom of not being cut off from the real world, allowing interaction and the tactile feedback of interacting with complex physical controls, while still allowing simultaneous use of virtual controls and by adding a real world reference point to aid in diminishing simulator sickness caused by visual motionA dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of ScienceGR201

New VR Navigation Techniques to Reduce Cybersickness

In nowadays state of the art VR environments, displayed in CAVEs or HMDs, navigation technics may frequently induce cybersickness or VR-Induced Symptoms and Effects (VRISE), drastically limiting the friendly use of VR environments with no navigation limitations. In two distinct experiments, we investigated acceleration VRISE thresholds for longitudinal and rotational motions and compared 3 different VR systems: 2 CAVEs and a HMD (Oculus Rift DK2). We found that VRISE occur more often and more strongly in case of rotational motions and found no major difference between the CAVEs and the HMD. Based on the obtained thresholds we developed a new "Head Lock" navigation method for rotational motions in a virtual environment in order to generate a “Pseudo AR” mode, keeping fixed visual outside world references. Thanks to a third experiment we have shown that this new metaphor significantly reduces VRISE occurrences and may be a useful base for future natural navigation technics

A Survey of Driving Research Simulators Around the World.

The literature review is part of the EPSRC funded project "Driver performance in the EPSRC driving simulator: a validation study". The aim of the project is to validate this simulator, located at the Department of Psychology, University of Leeds, and thereby to indicate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing configuration. It will provide guidance on how the simulator can be modified and overcome any deficiencies that are detected and also provide "benchmarks" against which other simulators can be compared. The literature review will describe the technical characteristics of the most well-known driving simulators around the world, their special features and their application areas until today. The simulators will be described and compared according to their cost (low, medium and high) and also contact addresses and photographs of the simulators will be provided by the end of the paper. In the process of gathering this information, it became apparent that there are mainly two types of papers published - either in journals or in proceedings from conferences: those describing only the technical characteristics of a specific simulator and those referring only to the applications of a specific simulator. For the first type of papers, the level of detail, format and content varies significantly where for the second one it has been proven extremely difficult to find any information about the technical characteristics of the simulator where the study had been carried out. A number of details provided in this paper are part of personal communication, or personal visits to those particular driving simulator centres or from the World Wide Web. It should also be noted here that most of the researchers contacted here offered very detail technical characteristics and application areas of their driving simulators and the author is grateful to them

Augmenting low-fidelity flight simulation training devices via amplified head rotations

Due to economic and operational constraints, there is an increasing demand from aviation operators and training manufacturers to extract maximum training usage from the lower fidelity suite of flight simulators. It is possible to augment low-fidelity flight simulators to achieve equivalent performance compared to high-fidelity setups but at reduced cost and greater mobility. In particular for visual manoeuvres, the virtual reality technique of head-tracking amplification for virtual view control enables full field-of-regard access even with limited field-of-view displays. This research quantified the effects of this technique on piloting performance, workload and simulator sickness by applying it to a fixed-base, low-fidelity, low-cost flight simulator. In two separate simulator trials, participants had to land a simulated aircraft from a visual traffic circuit pattern whilst scanning for airborne traffic. Initially, a single augmented display was compared to the common triple display setup in front of the pilot. Starting from the base leg, pilots exhibited tighter turns closer to the desired ground track and were more actively conducting visual scans using the augmented display. This was followed up by a second experiment to quantify the scalability of augmentation towards larger displays and field of views. Task complexity was increased by starting the traffic pattern from the downwind leg. Triple displays in front of the pilot yielded the best compromise delivering flight performance and traffic detection scores just below the triple projectors but without an increase in track deviations and the pilots were also less prone to simulator sickness symptoms. This research demonstrated that head augmentation yields clear benefits of quick user adaptation, low-cost, ease of systems integration, together with the capability to negate the impact of display sizes yet without incurring significant penalties in workload and incurring simulator sickness. The impact of this research is that it facilitates future flight training solutions using this augmentation technique to meet budgetary and mobility requirements. This enables deployment of simulators in large numbers to deliver expanded mission rehearsal previously unattainable within this class of low-fidelity simulators, and with no restrictions for transfer to other training media

Чинники, що спричиняють кіберхвороби

The section discusses factors impacting cybersickness.У розділі розглянуто чинники, що спричиняють кіберхвороби

Goggles in the lab:Economic experiments in immersive virtual environments

This review outlines the potential of virtual reality for creating naturalistic and interactive high-immersive environments in experimental economics. After explanation of essential terminology and technical equipment, the advantages are discussed by describing the available high-immersive VR experiments concerning economic topics to give an idea of the possibilities of VR for economic experiments. Furthermore, possible drawbacks are examined, including simulator sickness, the costs of VR equipment and specialist skills. By carefully controlling a naturalistic experimental context, virtual reality brings some field into the lab. Besides, it allows for testing contexts that would otherwise be unethical or impossible. It is a promising new tool in the experimental economics toolkit