Display Configuration and Simulator Sickness

1. Display Configuration and Simulator Sickness Ronald R. Mourant and Beverly K. Jaeger Virtual Environments Laboratory, Dept. of MIME 334 Snell Engineering Center Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts 02115 mourant@coe.neu.edu 83rd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board January 11-17, 2004 Washington, D.C.

2. Effects of Field of View on Presence, Enjoyment, Memory, and Simulator Sickness in a Virtual Environment Lin, J.W., Duh, B.L., Abi-Rached, H., Parker, D.E. Furness,T.A.III Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality 2002, pp. 164-171 Ten subjects at four FOVs (60º, 100º, 140º, and 180º).

3. Finding of Lin, J.W., Duh, B.L., Abi-Rached, H., Parker, D.E. Furness,T.A.III Mean and standard error of LN(SSQ) scores

4. More Findings of Lin, J.W., Duh, B.L., Abi-Rached, H., Parker, D.E. Furness,T.A.III “This study suggested a positive correlation between presence and SS and a negative one between enjoyment and SS. The correlation coefficients for the presence subscale and SSQ as well as for the enjoyment subscale and SSQ were highly significant.”

5. Still Sick of Games By Jeff Solomon www.loonygames.com “I think that it is quite possible that the less stable and more stroboscopic an image is (like the omnipresent flickering lights in Doom), the more likely these effects are to occur, which may seem similar to genuine simulator sickness.” (Rick Wyckoff) Another contributing factor, in my opinion, is color blindness. Being Red/Green colorblind, I have problems with everyday aspects of life, such as traffic lights. My assumption had been that my eyes' confusion over reds and greens amounted to problems being able to discern clearly the game's walls and floors. (Jesse Reisman)

6. Still Sick of Games By Jeff Solomon www.loonygames.com The game that caused me the worst motion sickness was Wolf3D, hardly a realistic virtual environment. The second worst was Duke3D. However, Descent 2 in hardware mode (which can run at up to 100fps and is very sharp in the graphics area) causes no motion sickness for me. I think my motion sickness (don't know about others) comes from a fast frame rate coupled with quick turning in the game (I'm a mouse user in most cases, but I use a joystick in Descent 2, which makes me "turn" much more smoothly). I used to get VERY sick playing Wolf3D when sliding in front of walls and looking for secret doors. The walls flying by at a quick pace made me almost immediately nauseous. (Charles Burkett) I discovered that, although I am fine while PLAYING the game, I get motion sick very quickly when I am watching a DEMO. I also get the same symptoms (to a lesser degree) when I'm watching someone else play. (Tony Fabris)

7. Still Sick of Games By Jeff Solomon www.loonygames.com At first he was ill every time he played, it was funny yet sad to witness this. Eventually he became immune to the effects though! He had "trained" himself not to become ill anymore! It was amazing. He could play Quake with no problems, yet Quake was the worst game for him just a few months back. Something else to note: He stopped playing for a month and when he started up again, he started to get the simulator sickness again.(Greg Patterson) I have found that even a one minute break every ten minutes (or 5 every hour) keeps [gaming sickness] from happening to me and a number of other people I play with. (Derek Piasecki)

8. A discussion of cybersickness in virtual environments Joseph J. LaViola, Jr.ACM SIGCHI Bulletin Vol 32 ,(January 2000) Pages: 47 - 56   Flicker is distracting, can cause eye fatigue, and has been shown to be a contributing factor for inducing cybersickness symptoms[12]. The perception of flicker has two interesting properties. First, it differs between individuals and depends on the flicker fusion frequency threshold 9 . Second, the like-lihood that flicker will be perceived increases as the field of view increases since the peripheral visual system is more sensitive to flicker than the fovea[2]. One of the goals of virtual reality is to surround the user's field of view with visual stimulation. This goal represents a problem since the wider the field of view the more susceptible humans are to flicker. In order to reduce the possibility of flicker, the refresh rate of the system must be increased. A refresh rate of 30Hz is usually good enough to remove perceived flicker from the fovea . However, for the periphery, refresh rates must be higher. As technology improves, these extremely high refresh rate visual displays should become more common and affordable.

9. Use of a Past History Questionnaire to Predict Simulator Sickness. Robert S. Kennedy, Kay M. Stanney, Susan Lanham DSC 2001, Sophia Antipolis, France Sickness is a potentially serious problem when unselected populations receive moderate or greater exposure to simulator or VR environments for more than a few minutes. Significant numbers (10-20% or more) of people will exit the situation if they can. Individuals seem to be aware of their own susceptibilities to problems in such environments. Tapping that awareness through structured questionnaires can identify many of those at highest risk for serious problems, and the predictive power of the MHQ seems sufficient to detect many potential problems without excessive numbers of false positives, particularly when the cost of a false positive is relatively low.

10. A “NATURAL” INDEPENDENT VISUAL BACKGROUND REDUCED SIMULATOR SICKNESS - James Jeng-Weei Lina Habib Abi-Racheda, Do-Hoe Kim, Donald E. Parkerb, Thomas A. FurnessHFES 46th Annual Meeting, October, 2002 Several studies indicated that an independent visual background (IVB) reduced simulator sickness (SS) and balance disturbance associated with exposure to virtual environments (VEs) and motion simulators. A recent study showed that an IVB comprised of an earth- fixed grid was less effective in a complex driving simulator than in a simple VE. Subjects’ post-experiment reports indicated that the VE motion “induced” motion of the earth-fixed grid IVB. This led to the suggestion that an IVB comprised of clouds would be less subject to induced motion and therefore would alleviate nausea more effectively than a grid IVB. Clouds are “natural” and are usually perceived as relatively stable, whereas a gird has no inherent stability. Twelve subjects were exposed to complex motion through a simulated environment in a driving simulator under 3 IVB conditions: grid, less clouds, and many clouds. They reported less nausea when the many-cloud IVB was used relative to the grid IVB condition.

11. Is It Possible to Learn and Transfer Spatial Information from Virtual to Real Worlds? Doris Höll , Bernd Leplow , Robby Schönfeld , Maximilian Mehdorn SpringerVerlag Heidelberg, 2003 ISSN: 0302-9743 In the study we report about in this paper the computer generated virtual environment is presented solely on a conventional computer monitor and the participant navigates through the world by means of a joystick. This does not create such a big sense of immersion as multi wall stereo projection systems or a Head-Mounted-Display (Mehlitz, Kleinoeder, Weniger, & Rienhoff, 1998). In this field of research it is common opinion today that desktop-systems are as effective as immersive systems in some cognitive tasks. A weighty reason to use this mode of presentation is to reduce the rate of participants experiencing cybersickness reported in other studies. The VR-environment provided in this study does not create such a great sense of immersion as other devices such as head-mounted displays do, but in this environment the problem of cybersickness does not seem to play such an important role as in other studies that use technology with a higher degree of immersion (e.g.Regan & Price, 1994).

12. Advice to Avoid Simulator Sickness There are things you can try that may help. Basically, you want to give your brain more visual stimuli that tell it you're not moving. If you play in a dark room, light it up; have plenty of obviously stationary visible stuff around the monitor. If you have a huge monitor and/or sit very close to the screen, move back, so the moving image takes up less of your field of view. http://www.dansdata.com/io025.htm

13. Recommendations • Use a small display FOV of less than 80 degrees. • Frames per second should be 100 or higher. • Use high display resolutions – 1600 x 1200 or better. • Eliminate flicker as much as possible.