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BalanceVR: Balance Training to Increase Tolerance to Cybersickness in Immersive Virtual Reality

Seonghoon Kang, Yechan Yang, Gerard Jounghyun Kim, Hanseob Kim

TL;DR

This work tackles cybersickness in immersive VR by testing whether balance training enhances tolerance and transfers to new VR content. Using a two-week, three-arm, between-subject design (2DT, VRT, VRO) and two sickness-inducing contents, it shows that VR-based balance training, especially in immersive VR, reduces cybersickness and improves balance more than mere exposure. A key finding is the transfer effect: immersive balance training reduces sickness in transfer VR content, indicating durable, cross-content tolerance. Collectively, the results support the postural instability theory and point to immersive VR balance regimens as a practical approach to mitigating cybersickness in VR training and applications.

Abstract

Cybersickness is a serious usability problem in virtual reality. Postural (or balance) instability theory has emerged as one of the major hypotheses for the cause of cybersickness. In this paper, we conducted a two-week-long experiment to observe the trends in user balance learning and sickness tolerance under different experimental conditions to analyze the potential inter-relationship between them. The experimental results have shown, aside from the obvious improvement in balance performance itself, that accompanying balance training had a stronger effect of increasing tolerance to cybersickness than mere exposure to VR. In addition, training in immersive VR was found to be more effective than using the 2D-based non-immersive medium, especially for the transfer effect to other non-training VR content.

BalanceVR: Balance Training to Increase Tolerance to Cybersickness in Immersive Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This work tackles cybersickness in immersive VR by testing whether balance training enhances tolerance and transfers to new VR content. Using a two-week, three-arm, between-subject design (2DT, VRT, VRO) and two sickness-inducing contents, it shows that VR-based balance training, especially in immersive VR, reduces cybersickness and improves balance more than mere exposure. A key finding is the transfer effect: immersive balance training reduces sickness in transfer VR content, indicating durable, cross-content tolerance. Collectively, the results support the postural instability theory and point to immersive VR balance regimens as a practical approach to mitigating cybersickness in VR training and applications.

Abstract

Cybersickness is a serious usability problem in virtual reality. Postural (or balance) instability theory has emerged as one of the major hypotheses for the cause of cybersickness. In this paper, we conducted a two-week-long experiment to observe the trends in user balance learning and sickness tolerance under different experimental conditions to analyze the potential inter-relationship between them. The experimental results have shown, aside from the obvious improvement in balance performance itself, that accompanying balance training had a stronger effect of increasing tolerance to cybersickness than mere exposure to VR. In addition, training in immersive VR was found to be more effective than using the 2D-based non-immersive medium, especially for the transfer effect to other non-training VR content.
Paper Structure (25 sections, 9 figures, 9 tables)

This paper contains 25 sections, 9 figures, 9 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related works
  3. Balance Training in VR
  4. Cybersickness
  5. Experiment
  6. Experimental Design
  7. Experimental Task and Training Contents
  8. Dependent Variables
  9. Participants
  10. Experimental Set-up and Procedure
  11. Results
  12. Change in Sickness Levels
  13. EW1
  14. EW2
  15. Balance Performance Improvement
  16. ...and 10 more sections

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: Three different types of cybersickness training methods tested: (a) Virtual reality-based balance training (VRT); (b) Virtual reality exposure only (VRO); and (c) 2D projection-based (non-immersive) balance training (2DT). The between-subject design was performed.
  • Figure 2: Two training VR environments/contents: (a) a jet fighter flight through the forest (less sickness-inducing) and (b) a wild roller-coaster ride (more sickness-inducing).
  • Figure 3: Snapshots depicting the different trajectories of the two balance/sickness training contents: forest trail for week 1 (EW1) and wild rollercoaster for week 2 (EW2). During the experiment, subjects experience the following types of movements: (1) straight-forward movement; (2) turning left/right; (3) going up; (4) vertical loop; and (5) going down.
  • Figure 4: The navigational path profiles of the contents used in EW1 (a) and EW2 (b).
  • Figure 5: The overall experimental process for EW1 and EW2.
  • ...and 4 more figures