What They Say
A group of researchers from Iowa State University has undertaken research into ‘cybersickness’ which can cause a number of discomfort feelings in users within just a few minutes of trying it. The discomfort is caused by the user receiving conflicting sensory information.
“We know people can adapt to sea sickness through repeated exposures. After several days on a boat, they’ll start to feel better,” said Prof. Jonathan Kelly. “My research team and I want to figure out to what extent people can adapt to cybersickness and whether their adaptation in one VR experience can carry over to others.”
Initial results from a study with 150 undergraduate students indicate symptoms do improve with just three 20-minute sessions of VR over a week, but a higher percentage of women and people who are prone to motion sickness have a harder time adapting to cybersickness and different VR environments. Half of the participants in the first session said they felt too sick to complete the full session of game play. That number dropped to a quarter of the participants by the third session.
What We Think
Over 25 years ago, my first consulting project when I started Meko Ltd was for Scottish Enterprise, who were interested in investing in VR (Virtuality was a big start-up at the time). I was quite negative about it as I thought that the technology was much too immature and I also highlighted the human factors issues. At the time, the kind of ppi needed for any kind of realism was clearly a long way away, but it seemed to me that improving the realism might actually make the human factors issues worse. Since then, a better understanding of issues such as latency has developed, but it’s clear that there could still be human factors challenges. (BR)
