Is Video Gaming a Cure for Cybersickness? Gamers Experience Less Cybersickness Than Non-Gamers in a VR Self-Motion Task

Katharina Pöhlmann, G. Li, Graham Wilson, Mark McGill, Frank Pollick, Stephen Anthony Brewster

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Cybersickness remains a major drawback of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, as a breadth of stationary experiences with visual self-motion can result in visually-induced motion sickness. However, not everybody experiences the same intensity or type of adverse symptoms. Here we propose that prior experience with virtual environments can predict ones degree of cybersickness. Video gaming can enhance visuospatial abilities, which in-turn relate negatively to cybersickness - meaning that consistently engaging in virtual environments can result in protective habituation effects. In a controlled stationary VR experiment, we found that ‘VR-naive’ video gamers experienced significantly less cybersickness in a virtual tunnel-travel task and outperformed ‘VR-naive’ non-video gamers on a visual attention task. These findings strongly motivate the use of non-VR games for training VR cybersickness resilience, with future research needed to further understand the mechanism(s) by which gamers become cybersickness resilient - potentially expanding access to VR for even the most susceptible participants.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7225 - 7233
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume30
Issue number11
Early online date10 Sept 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Sept 2024

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