Title: Rotation Blurring: Use of Artificial Blurring to Reduce Cybersickness in Virtual Reality First Person Shooters,
Abstract: Users of Virtual Reality (VR) systems often experience vection, the
perception of self-motion in the absence of any physical movement. While
vection helps to improve presence in VR, it often leads to a form of motion
sickness called cybersickness. Cybersickness is a major deterrent to large
scale adoption of VR.
Prior work has discovered that changing vection (changing the perceived speed
or moving direction) causes more severe cybersickness than steady vection
(walking at a constant speed or in a constant direction). Based on this idea,
we try to reduce the cybersickness caused by character movements in a First
Person Shooter (FPS) game in VR. We propose Rotation Blurring (RB), uniformly
blurring the screen during rotational movements to reduce cybersickness. We
performed a user study to evaluate the impact of RB in reducing cybersickness.
We found that the blurring technique led to an overall reduction in sickness
levels of the participants and delayed its onset. Participants who experienced
acute levels of cybersickness benefited significantly from this technique.