Effect of motion mismatches on ratings of motion incongruence and simulator sickness in urban driving simulations

• Continuous ratings show that simulator mismatches affect simulator sickness. • Lateral, longitudinal, and then yaw mismatches most affect incongruence ratings. • For simulator sickness, the order differs: longitudinal, yaw, and then lateral. • False and missing cues induce disproportionally worse ratings than scaled cues. This paper investigates the effects of motion mismatches on simulator sickness and subjective ratings of the motion. In an open-loop driving simulator experiment, participants were driven through a recorded urban drive twelve times, in which mismatches were induced by manipulating the following three aspects in motion cueing: (i) mismatches in specific vehicle axes, (ii) mismatch types (scaling, missing, and false cues), and (iii) inconsistent scaling between different motion axes. Subjects ( N =52) reported simulator sickness post-hoc (after each drive), as well as continuously during each drive, a first in simulator sickness research. Furthermore, subjective post-hoc motion incongruence ratings on the quality of the motion were extracted. Results show that longitudinal motion mismatches lead to the most simulator sickness and the highest ratings, followed by mismatches in lateral motion, then yaw rate. False cues induce the most sickness, followed by missing and then scaled motion. Inconsistent scaling between the axes has no significant effect. The continuous sickness ratings support that the occurrence and severity of simulator sickness are indeed related to mismatches in simulator motion of specific maneuvers. This paper contributes to an improved understanding of the relationship between simulator motion and sickness, allowing for more targeted motion cueing strategies to prevent and reduce sickness in driving simulators. These strategies may include the appropriate selection of the simulator, the motion cueing, and the sample of participants, following the presented results.