“Differences in Virtual and Physical Head Pose” Predict Cybersickness When Naturalistic Head-Movements are Made in VR

When we move during virtual reality (VR) display lag produces Differences in our Virtual and Physical head pose (DVP). Research suggests that DVP can be used to predict cybersickness during head-mounted display (HMD) based VR. However, these studies always had participants make unusual (continuous oscillatory) head-movements. This study examined whether DVP also predicts cybersickness during more typical VR conditions. After assessing their susceptibility to real-world motion sickness (using the MSSQ-Revised), 67 participants repeatedly moved their heads to “target” objects that appeared inside a virtual room (under different experimentally imposed display lags). We found that cybersickness was more likely and severe when: (1) participants had higher MSSQ scores; (2) the spatial magnitudes and the detrended fluctuation analysis α values of their DVP increased. Based on these findings we believe that real-time estimates of the DVP could be used to warn users about the imminent onset of sickness during consumer HMD VR.