PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jacqueline M. Fulvio
AU  - Mohan Ji
AU  - Bas Rokers
TI  - Variability in Sensory Sensitivity Predicts Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality
AID  - 10.1101/488817
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 488817
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/06/488817.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/06/488817.full
AB  - The goal of virtual reality (VR) is to provide an immersive experience. However, VR displays often give rise to discomfort, including motion sickness. The cause of motion sickness, and especially the reason behind its variability across observers has remained unclear. According to the most popular theory, motion sickness is caused by sensory cue conflicts, known as the evolutionary hypothesis. Our prior work indicates considerable individual variability in observer’s sensitivity to cues that specify 3D motion. If cue conflicts are the cause of motion sickness, people who are particularly sensitive to these cues should be more susceptible. In a large sample of individuals, we related the propensity for motion sickness to sensitivity to multiple 3D motion cues. As hypothesized, propensity for motion sickness was predicted by cue sensitivity, but this relationship was specific to visual motion parallax cues. We also determined that, by tailoring the interpupillary distance of the device to the individual observer, excluded other explanations, including inherent sex differences in VR tolerance. Lastly, we found that observers self-regulate motion sickness through suppression of head movement. These results identify the cause of motion sickness in VR, and suggest that sickness may be eliminated by targeted reduction of cue conflicts due to motion parallax.