Personalised visual-vestibular coherence and simulator sickness
conference paper
Simulator sickness can be explained by a conflict between visual and vestibular self-motion cues. In real life, retinal image- and physical self-motion are equal but opposite. Most moving-base simulators, however, apply less physical motion than visually displayed, the ratio (gain) between visual and vestibular motion being fixed. It has, however, been shown that for linear motion the optimal gain was about two on average, and varied largely between subjects. We accordingly posed the question whether this gain could explain individual differ-ences in simulator sickness. We then exposed subjects to a continuous physical linear sinusoidal motion with fixed amplitude on a sled, and presented the corresponding visual motion in a virtual environment using VR gog-gles. This visual motion was in phase with and opposite the physical motion, except for its amplitude that subjects had to adjust by handheld buttons until it matched their perceived physical motion best. After determining each subject’s optimal gain, we then exposed them to separate sessions using their optimal gain and a three times smaller gain while rating motion sickness. Results confirmed the reported large individual variability in optimal gains as observed previously, but did not show an effect of the visual-vestibular gain on their sickness scores.
TNO Identifier
1024312
Source title
Proceedings of the Driving Simulation Conference, DSC 2025 Europe XR, Driving Simulation Association, 24-26 September, Stuttgart, Germany
Pages
61-67