Virtual Environment Sickness: Adaptation to and Recovery from a Search Task

Abstract

Virtual Environment technology provides a new way to simulate real world activities. Research conducted in our program and elsewhere indicates that VE sickness is common and may affect the use of VE (Lampton, et al., 1994; Wann, 1993). Kolasinski (1995) identified three categories of factors associated with simulator sickness: individual, task, or equipment (simulator) based. We employed the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (Kennedy, et al., 1993) to investigate the progress of symptoms over an experiment. The task required searching through VE representations of complex building interiors for targets. The SSQ scores were not related to experimental condition nor was there a meaningful relationship with individual characteristics. Analyses found sickness: 1) increasing significantly from pre-VE exposure to mid-experiment measures, 2) significantly elevated at experiment end when compared to pre-experiment measures, and 3) not significantly different from the initial scores after a recovery period. These results indicate that a large proportion of the populace adapts to and recovers from VE successfully and within relatively short time frames.