TY - JOUR
T1 - Is Video Gaming a Cure for Cybersickness? Gamers Experience Less Cybersickness Than Non-Gamers in a VR Self-Motion Task
AU - Pöhlmann, Katharina
AU - Li, G.
AU - Wilson, Graham
AU - McGill, Mark
AU - Pollick, Frank
AU - Brewster, Stephen Anthony
PY - 2024/9/10
Y1 - 2024/9/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-85204383390&partnerID=MN8TOARS
U2 - 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456176
DO - 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456176
M3 - Article
SN - 1077-2626
VL - 30
SP - 7225
EP - 7233
JO - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IS - 11
ER -