Presence and Cybersickness in Virtual Reality Are Negatively Related: A Review

By Séamas Weech, Sophie Kenny, Michael Barnett-Cowan. Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

735 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In order to take advantage of the potential offered by the medium of virtual reality (VR), it will be essential to develop an understanding of how to maximize the desirable experience of “presence” in a virtual space (“being there”), and how to minimize the undesirable feeling of “cybersickness” (a constellation of discomfort symptoms experienced in VR). Although there have been frequent reports of a possible link between the observer’s sense of presence and the experience of bodily discomfort in VR, the amount of literature that discusses the nature of the relationship is limited. Recent research has underlined the possibility that these variables have shared causes, and that both factors may be manipulated with a single approach. This review paper summarizes the concepts of presence and cybersickness and highlights the strengths and gaps in our understanding about their relationship. We review studies that have measured the association between presence and cybersickness, and conclude that the balance of evidence favors a negative relationship between the two factors which is driven principally by sensory integration processes. We also discuss how system immersiveness might play a role in modulating both presence and cybersickness. However, we identify a serious absence of high-powered studies that aim to reveal the nature of this relationship. Based on this evidence we propose recommendations for future studies investigating presence, cybersickness, and other related factors.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc4339e15865bc3630d58a769915a72699df888d

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Citations in the corpus

• The challenges of entering the metaverse: An experiment on the effect of extended reality on workload (2022, background): “…difficulties in controlling virtual objects as effortlessly as in a physical environment, as well as increased perceptions of stress, discomfort, disorientation, and especially in VR, the problem of cybersickness (Munafo et al., 2017; Sharples et al., 2008; Somrak et al., 2019; Weech et al., 2019).”
• The metaverse in education: Definition, framework, features, potential applications, challenges, and future research topics (2022, background): “…the reality created by the sensor and virtual technologies, and plenty of scenarios and items that exist in the metaverse but miss in the real world, make learners more easily indulge in such a bizarre metaverse world (Choi and Kim, 2017; Weech et al., 2019; Kye et al., 2021; Prieto et al., 2022).”