A Study on Virtual Reality Sickness and Visual Attention

It is a well-known fact that virtual reality (VR) sickness is an obstacle to an immersive VR experience, however, an objective analysis of the physiological responses for VR sickness has been insufficient. In this study, our analysis uncovers how the users' visual attention varies with the level of VR sickness and how the level of VR sickness influences the center-bias tendency. Toward this, we first conduct a large-scale eye-tracking experiment of 21 inexperienced users while they experience VR sickness-oriented database VR-SP [15]. Then, we quantify the tendency of visual behavior according to VR sickness. To do this, we newly define a visual entropy measurement of VR visual attention. The experimental results clearly suggest that the center-bias effect becomes stronger as the degree of VR sickness increases. In other words, this implies that the users' explorativeness in VR content may be restricted by the VR sickness and this leads to the restraint of the immersive experience. For a more clear demonstration, we also show the visual entropy can be used to predict VR sickness with an accuracy of 80% on the VR-SP database.