Scene movement: an important cause of cybersickness

Head-coupled (head-steered) virtual reality display systems can cause motion sickness (cyber-sickness). This chapter reviews past literature on cybersickness and reports two series of experiments conducted to identify the cause(s) of cybersickness. The first series consists of two experiments conducted to investigate the effects of and interactions between rotational scene movements and head movement. The aim was to verify the importance of scene movement to the generation of cybersickness. Preliminary results indicate that the presence of scene movement can more than double the level of cybersickness. Initial data also showed that scene movement in the absence of head movement is associated with higher levels of cybersickness than scene movement with either correlated or uncorrelated head movements. The second series of experiments studied the level of cybersickness with scene movements of different complexity and velocity. Significant increases in the level of cybersickness have been obtained when either scene complexity or scene velocity is increased.