Motion Sickness Symptoms and Perception of Self Motion from Exposure to Different Wallpaper Patterns

Abstract

Vection refers to the compelling visual illusion of self-motion experienced in virtual environments by stationary individuals when viewing moving visual surrounds. Early research with these perceptions generally employed a vertically striped drum of about 1.5 meters in diameter. The illusion of self-motion or vection generated in these optokinetic drums is particularly useful for studying the effects of optic flow imagery in virtual environments because the subject determines the precise time at which the vection occurs and the nauseogenic experience is stopped; thus problems of motion sickness, nausea, and vomiting can be monitored and/or minimized. This vection, presumably related to the reflexive optokinetic nystagmus (OKN), experimentally presents a non-invasive neural visual response which may be safely used for the investigation of possible motion sickness symptoms ranging from the so called Sopite syndrome to the nausea and vomiting which may be experienced in some virtual environments. Further, to be able to examine the effects of color, texture, and differing scene content, we constructed a vection drum with easily reconfigurable displays. Therefore, for stimulus material, instead of the conventional black and white stripes, we employed differing patterns of household wallpaper. Results showed that, while equal amounts of vection were produced with the wallpaper, one pattern appeared to produce less sickness.