A Testbed for Studying Cybersickness and its Mitigation in Immersive Virtual Reality

Cybersickness (CS) represents one of the oldest problems affecting Virtual Reality (VR) technology. In an attempt to resolve or at least limit this form of discomfort, an increasing number of mitigation techniques have been proposed by academic and industrial researchers. However, the validation of such techniques is often carried out without grounding on a common methodology, making the comparison between the various works in the state of the art difficult. To address this issue, the present article proposes a novel testbed for studying CS in immersive VR and, in particular, methods to mitigate it. The testbed consists of four virtual scenarios, which have been designed to elicit CS in a targeted and predictable manner. The scenarios, grounded on available literature, support the extraction of objective metrics about user's performance. The testbed additionally integrates an experimental protocol that employs standard questionnaires as well as measurements typically adopted in state-of-the-art practice to assess levels of CS and other subjective aspects regarding User Experience. The article shows a possible use case of the testbed, concerning the evaluation of a CS mitigation technique that is compared with the absence of mitigation as baseline condition.