HCC: Small: Harnessing Cognitive Engagement Tasks to Counteract Cybersickness in VR

Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting technology, but many people cannot use it because it makes them feel sick. This problem, called cybersickness, causes symptoms like nausea, headaches, dizziness, and eye strain, similar to motion sickness in a car. Cybersickness happens when what we see in VR does not match what our body feels in the real world. For example, a person might feel like they're moving in VR but know they are sitting still in real life. This project explores a new way to reduce cybersickness. It explores if people feel less sick when given simple tasks to do while in VR, like listening to music or solving puzzles. These activities may distract users from feeling sick, like how listening to music can help with car sickness. The goal is to help people use VR for longer without discomfort. This project could make VR more accessible for education, entertainment, and job training. It may also encourage and enable more fields to use VR technology. The project aims to study how periodic distraction tasks affect cybersickness in VR. The project will look at realistic and abstract tasks, how demanding they are mentally, and how long they should last. The project has four main goals: 1) Test how tasks affect cybersickness in different sickness inducing situations in VR. 2) Study how emotions and task length impacts cybersickness and mental workload. 3) Create an artificial intelligence system to automatically distract users at the right times. 4) Use this research to teach college students about VR, cybersickness, and user-centric VR design. The project will involve them in hands-on projects. The team will also work with outreach organizations to introduce VR concepts to a diverse group of students. All the findings, tools, and data from this project will be made available to other researchers and VR developers. This will help create a shared resource of information on using distraction tasks to reduce cybersickness in VR. The project aims to provide practical ways to make VR experiences more comfortable. This could lead to more people being able to enjoy and benefit from this technology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.