Assessment of a Short, Focused Training to Reduce Symptoms of Cybersickness

摘要

Past reports have suggested that active visual training in virtual reality (VR) can reducesymptoms of cybersickness. Here,we adapted such a protocol to a computer-basedversion and compared it with a passive exposure control condition.We employedheart rate and other subjective predictors of cybersickness to try to predict the efficacyof the intervention as well as likelihood of drop out.While we found a significantdecrease in heart rate across sessions, the intervention we employed did not appearto be effective at reducing cybersickness or dropout.However, a heart rate increaseof 15.5 bpm from baseline, nausea self-report of 4.5 on a scale of 1–10, and dizzinessself-report of 5.5 on a scale of 1–10 predicted an equal probability of experimentdropout, independent of whether participants were in the experimental or controlintervention condition. Our findings suggest that a single immersion of visual training inVR or passive VR exposure may not be sufficient to provide adaptation for VR. At thesame time, our findings bolster past reports suggesting the value of employing heartrate monitoring, rather than subjective reports, to monitor the onset of cybersickness.