Virtual Reality Sickness During Immersion: an Investigation of Potential Obstacles Towards General Accessibility of VR Technology
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Examensarbete 30hp August 2016 Virtual Reality sickness during immersion: An investigation of potential obstacles towards general accessibility of VR technology. A controlled study for investigating the accessibility of modern VR hardware and the usability of HTC Vive’s motion controllers. Dongsheng Lu Abstract People call the year of 2016 as the year of virtual reality. As the world leading tech giants are releasing their own Virtual Reality (VR) products, the technology of VR has been more available than ever for the mass market now. However, the fact that the technology becomes cheaper and by that reaches a mass-market, does not in itself imply that long-standing usability issues with VR have been addressed. Problems regarding motion sickness (MS) and motion control (MC) has been two of the most important obstacles for VR technology in the past. The main research question of this study is: “Are there persistent universal access issues with VR related to motion control and motion sickness?” In this study a mixed method approach has been utilized for finding more answers related to these two important aspects. A literature review in the area of VR, MS and MC was followed by a quantitative controlled study and a qualitative evaluation. 32 participants were carefully selected for this study, they were divided into different groups and the quantitative data collected from them were processed and analyzed by using statistical test. An interview was also carried out with all of the participants of this study in order to gather more details about the usability of the motion controllers used in this study. The results of this study has validated several existing frameworks for VR. And in conclusion, this study has also shown that both previous motion sickness experiences and gender factors weren’t significant in terms of general accessibility issues on PCVR platforms. There are hints showing that the VR technology on PC platform could be universal accessible, since both of the quantitative and qualitative results has provided some evidences supporting this finding. However, more similar studies need to be carried out in order to identify more possible factors that would give an impact on user experiences in VR. The results of this study has also given implications of that today’s VR technology is developing on the right track and it could slowly become adopted by the mainstream and mass-market in the future. 2 Acknowledgement First of all, I would say a great thank you to Annika, you have taken over my supervision during the time I have encountered a lot of difficulties even though you had a lot of other works to do. It was you who encouraged me and made me believe that this study can actually be done in time. And again thank you for all the help and guidance you have given me. I have learned a lot from you and your courses and you will always remain as my teacher, my professor and my mentor of life. My heartfelt gratitude to the department of Informatics and Media. The department purchased the device for me and made it possible so I could use the best and most recent released VR hardware available on the mass market, this helped me and this study to avoid a lot of uncertainties that might be caused by outdated hardware. Also thank you, Johan Nysjö of the IT Department, who lent me the instruments for pre-study. The pre-study has been an important part of my study as well, and your generosity is greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank all of the people who were involved in this study, the teachers, my friends, my classmates who gave me feedback and took their time to participate in this study, you all have been a very important part of this study. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................................. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................................................................................................................ 3 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 6 1.1 PUPOSE AND RESEARCH QUESTION .................................................................................... 7 2. BACKGROUND .................................................................................................................................... 9 2.1 VIRTUAL REALITY .................................................................................................................. 9 2.2 INPUT METHODS FOR VR .................................................................................................... 9 2.3 HEAD MOUNTED DISPLAYS ............................................................................................... 11 2.4 CLASSIFICATION OF THE RECENT VR HEADSETS ............................................................... 11 2.5 IMMERSIONS & PRESENCE IN VR ...................................................................................... 12 2.6 ROLE-PLAYING VIDEO GAMES & GAMING EXPERIENCES ................................................. 12 2.7 AVAILABLE VR HARDWARE FOR CONSUMERS .................................................................. 12 3. PREVIOUS RESEARCH ...................................................................................................................... 13 3.1 MOTION SICKNESS ............................................................................................................ 13 3.2 INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND SUSCEPTIBILITY ............................................................... 14 3.3 IMOTION CONTROLLERS IN VR ......................................................................................... 14 4. THEORY ............................................................................................................................................ 15 4.1 SENSORY CONFLICT THEORY ............................................................................................. 15 4.2 POSTURAL INSTABILITY THEORY ....................................................................................... 17 4.3 FLOW THEORY ................................................................................................................... 18 4.4 SENSORIMOTOR ADAPTATION ......................................................................................... 19 5. METHOD .......................................................................................................................................... 20 5.1 MS MEASUREMENTS ......................................................................................................... 20 5.2 SIMULATOR SICKNESS QUESTIONNAIRE (SSQ) .................................................................. 20 5.3 PRE-STUDY ........................................................................................................................ 21 5.4 METHOD APPLICATION ..................................................................................................... 23 5.4.1 TEST PARTICIPANTS ..................................................................................................... 23 5.4.2 MATERIALS AND EXPERIMENT LOCATION .................................................................. 23 4 5.4.3 SELECTING VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT ........................................................................... 24 5.4.4 VANISHING REALMS: RITE OF STEEL............................................................................ 24 5.4.5 EXPERIMENT PROCEDURE ........................................................................................... 25 6. RESULTS ........................................................................................................................................... 28 6.1 PARTICIPANT PROFILING .................................................................................................... 28 6.2 RAW DATA FOR GROUP WITH PREVIOUS MS ................................................................... 30 6.3 RAW DATA FOR GROUP WITHOUT PREVIOUS MS ............................................................ 31 6.4 COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO GROUPS ........................................................................... 32 6.5 COMPARISON BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE GROUPS .................................................... 34 6.6 COMPARISON OF AVERAGE VALUES OF OVERALL VR SICKNESS SYMPTOM SCORES........ 35 6.7 QUALITATIVE RESULTS ...................................................................................................... 36 7. DICUSSION ....................................................................................................................................... 38 7.1 SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE ................................................................................................. 38 7.2 DETAILED EXPLANATION OF COLLECTED SCORES ............................................................. 38 7.3 SUGGESTIONS FOR CURRENT MS MEASUREMENT STANDARD ....................................... 38 7.4 THE PROCESS OF SENSORIMOTOR ADAPTATION ............................................................. 39 7.5 MOTION CONTROLLERS FOR VR CONTENTS ..................................................................... 39 7.6 LIMITATIONS CONTROLLERS FOR VR CONTENTS .............................................................. 39 7.5 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE WORK ....................................................................... 40 8. CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................................................