A Feasibility and Impact Investigation of Continuous Subjective Cybersickness Feedback Reporting

This paper quantitatively investigates the feasibility of, and merit in, soliciting continuous subjective cybersickness ratings as participants passively engage in an immersive VR experience. The main research questions addressed are: (1) Feasibility: To what extent will participants successfully engage, unprompted, in continuous cybersickness reporting while engaging with a secondary task? and (2) Merit: To what extent do continuously reported subjective cybersickness ratings offer valuable insights beyond what can be obtained from less frequent querying?Participants used a physical slider device, in conjunction with discreet visual feedback, to continuously report their instantaneous motion sickness state as they rode nineteen consecutive rounds of a virtual roller coaster ride and performed a simple visual counting task. We analyzed the reported sickness ratings in the context of pre-post SSQ scores, #rounds endured before quitting, tonic skin conductance levels (SCL), optical flow of the visual stimulus, and rotational and translational velocity of the virtual viewpoint, as well as in comparison to previously-obtained data from different participants who underwent the same exposure but only verbally reported a single FMS score at the end of each round (every 65s).We found that most participants used the slider actively, and that, averaged across participants, the reported sickness scores not only increased over time but also varied up and down in conjunction with the intensity of the ride. We found a statistically significant positive correlation between instantaneous reported sickness levels and tonic electrodermal activity in 76% of our participants, as well as a statistically significant positive correlation with optical flow magnitude and viewpoint rotational velocity. We observed no significant differences in #rounds completed, I SSQ scores, and average maximum or average last-reported sickness levels between the continuous and discrete reporting groups.Altogether, our results (1) demonstrate the feasibility of collecting valid self-reported ratings of cybersickness on a continuous basis during a passive VR experience, and (2) suggest that such data has the potential to be useful for better understanding cybersickness evolution in the context of potentially transient triggers.