Cybersickness with Virtual Reality Training Applications: a claustrophobia phenomenon with headmounted displays?

A study has been conducted to compare the level of sickness reported during a twenty-minute virtual reality simulation with and without scene movements. Virtual simulation generated by a Silicon Graphics workstation was presented on a biocular HMD. Sixteen male subjects participated the experiment and the levels of nausea were rated orally at five-minute intervals. Results indicated that with scene movement in the yaw axis, nausea ratings increased with increasing exposure duration. Without scene movement , the median level of nausea ratings remained at the zero level. After five minutes of simulation, nausea ratings in the presence of scene movement were significantly greater than those collected without scene movement (p<0.01). This suggests that scene movement is a cause of cybersickness and that viewing a stationary virtual scene with a head-mounted display would not cause symptoms of nausea. This was confirmed by data collected using the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ).