UC Santa Cruz

Over the past two decades, advancements in virtual reality have been researched and applied in numerous fields ranging from therapy to training to education. As the medium has evolved, so have the methods used for examining the subjective experiences and objective behaviors that take place while accessing virtual reality, including desirable factors like “presence” and “immersion” as well as undesirable experiences like motion sickness (more accurately, cybersickness). Within both research and recreational applications of VR, cybersickness represents an obstacle to the ideal user experience. The high prevalence of cybersickness in virtual reality applications limits users’ ability to enjoy and engage with the environment and hampers researchers’ ability to use virtual reality as an experimental tool. Virtual reality has the novel potential to create stimuli that generate unique responses in participants, such as the false perception of self-motion due to visual cues (an illusory phenomenon known as “vection”). Ameliorating the effects of cybersickness could open the doors for more fine-grained and generalizable research of such phenomena. Furthermore, a more holistic understanding of the illusory self-motion mechanism (vection) as it relates to sickness would help inform future studies on user experience within VR. This document summarizes a series of three experiments designed to investigate interactions between vection, motion sickness, and presence in the context of a virtual reality driving simulation.