Simulation Sickness Related to Virtual Reality Driving Simulation

This paper reports on a study regarding the conditions that reduce simulation sickness in virtual reality driving simulation. Simulation sickness in virtual reality applications is frequent and thus poses a major obstacle in obtaining data from participants involved in these simulations. Many solutions have been presented by various sources on how to reduce the occurrence of simulation sickness symptoms. Nevertheless, there is not enough evidence to back up an appropriate solution that works for the majority of simulated environments and individuals. Therefore, this work was meant to find appropriate solutions of simulation sickness related to virtual reality driving simulators with a focus on the effect of adding visual assets in the simulated environment. Initially, an online survey was performed with 31 participants in order to gather unbiased users’ experiences with driving simulation and virtual reality with regards to simulation sickness. Based on the information gathered from related works and suggestions of the online survey participants, the addition of motion cues and visual assets were identified as very essential when dealing with simulation sickness related to driving simulation. Therefore, new visual assets were added to enhance an already implemented simulator software in order to replicate a realistic traffic environment. An experiment with 72 participants was used to test eight hypotheses related to virtual reality driving simulation and simulations sickness. The results indicate that the addition of visual assets to the virtual reality driving simulator reduced the onset of simulation sickness and improved the driving session’s duration.