Side Effects and Aftereffects of Immersion in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Immersive Virtual Environment (VE) technology, also known as virtual reality, is being touted as an important new medium for education and training. Other potential applications involve communications, medicine, architecture, astronomy, data handling, teleoperation, and entertainment. A threat to the successful application of this technology is that some users of VE systems suffer unwanted side effects and aftereffects similar to, but not limited to, symptoms of motion sickness. These effects may degrade training effectiveness and jeopardize user safety and well-being. This paper describes the incidence and severity of symptoms we recorded during four different experiments which examined VE training applications. The experiments involved a variety of tasks, simulated environments, and VE systems. We administered a 28 item questionnaire that addressed symptoms related to nausea, eye strain, and dizziness. Significant variation was observed across individuals. In each experiment some users, between 4 and 16%, experienced discomfort to the extent that we terminated their participation. Most users enjoyed the VE experiment but reported some level of discomfort. Our findings indicated that sickness resulting from VE immersion is a potentially serious problem which may not be completely eradicated by improvements in equipment. This paper describes the patterns of effects we observed, discusses the challenges of measuring effects, and outlines future research.