Machine learning architectures to predict motion sickness using a Virtual Reality rollercoaster simulation tool

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) can cause an unprecedented immersion and feeling of presence yet a lot of users experience motion sickness when moving through a virtual environment. Rollercoaster rides are popular in Virtual Reality but have to be well designed to limit the amount of nausea the user may feel. This paper describes a novel framework to get automated ratings on motion sickness using Neural Networks. An application that lets users create rollercoasters directly in VR, share them with other users and ride and rate them is used to gather real-time data related to the in-game behaviour of the player, the track itself and users' ratings based on a Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) integrated into the application. Machine learning architectures based on deep neural networks are trained using this data aiming to predict motion sickness levels. While this paper focuses on rollercoasters this framework could help to rate any VR application on motion sickness and intensity that involves camera movement. A new well defined dataset is provided in this paper and the performance of the proposed architectures are evaluated in a comparative study.