Interactive Media Systems, TU Wien

Kinetosis / Motion Sickness: A new Approach for Adaptation in Virtual Reality

Thesis by Petra Kölndorfer

Supervision by Hannes Kaufmann

Abstract

Kinetosis is the medical expression for motion sickness. It comes from the Greek word "kinein" which means "to move". In this master´s thesis the effects of motion sickness and cybersickness are described. This topic is first discussed on the basis of existing works in which former approaches are demonstrated. Motion sickness occurs when the information of all parts of the equilibrium organ - ears, muscles and eyes - do not send consistent information to the brain. There exist three main theories which all try to describe the mechanism of becoming motion or cybersick. Besides this there are also other factors which cause cybersickness. The symptoms of the illness are very different and there are many of them, for example eye strain, headache and nausea. The first part of the thesis describes these medical foundations in detail. The practical part of this work tests the hypothesis if a short time training program is useful for people who suffer from cybersickness. To prove this a virtual environment was built to train test persons within four days. The training itself required them to watch a replay of a racing game for up to 25 minutes per session. On each of the four days exactly one session was held. A questionnaire was created to quantify the results of this training. The sickness scores were analyzed and due to this data the conclusion was drawn. At the end a small outlook to the future of cybersickness research is given.

Reference

P. Kölndorfer: "Kinetosis / Motion Sickness: A new Approach for Adaptation in Virtual Reality"; Supervisor: H. Kaufmann; Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems, 2009.

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