Real-Time Prediction of Simulator Sickness in Virtual Reality Games

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology has progressed rapidly and is used in various domains, particularly games. Simulator sickness (SS) still represents a significant problem for its wider adoption. The most common way to detect SS is using the simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ). SSQ is a subjective measurement and is inadequate for real-time applications such as VR games. This research aims to develop a model to predict SS in real time using in-game characters’ movement and users’ eye motion data during gameplay in VR games. To achieve this, we designed an experiment to collect such data with three types of games. We trained a long short-term memory neural network with the eye-tracking and character movement data to predict SS. Our model can predict SS in real time with an accuracy of 83.4% for players who suffer from severe sensitivity to SS. Our results indicate that, in VR games, our model is an accurate and efficient method to predict SS in real time.