Virtual Reality sickness during immersion: An investigation ofpotential obstacles towards general accessibility of VR technology

Abstract: People call the year of 2016 as the year of virtual reality. As the world leading tech giants are releasing their own Virtual Reality (VR) products, the technology of VR has been more available than ever for the mass market now. However, the fact that the technology becomes cheaper and by that reaches a mass-market, does not in itself imply that long-standing usability issues with VR have been addressed. Problems regarding motion sickness (MS) and motion control (MC) has been two of the most important obstacles for VR technology in the past. The main research question of this study is: “Are there persistent universal access issues with VR related to motion control and motion sickness?” In this study a mixed method approach has been utilized for finding more answers related to these two important aspects. A literature review in the area of VR, MS and MC was followed by a quantitative controlled study and a qualitative evaluation. 32 participants were carefully selected for this study, they were divided into different groups and the quantitative data collected from them were processed and analyzed by using statistical test. An interview was also carried out with all of the participants of this study in order to gather more details about the usability of the motion controllers used in this study. The results of this study has validated several existing frameworks for VR. And in conclusion, this study has also shown that both previous motion sickness experiences and gender factors weren’t significant in terms of general accessibility issues on PCVR platforms. There are hints showing that the VR technology on PC platform could be universal accessible, since both of the quantitative and qualitative results has provided some evidences supporting this finding. However, more similar studies need to be carried out in order to identify more possible factors that would give an impact on user experiences in VR. The results of this study has also given implications of that today’s VR technology is developing on the right track and it could slowly become adopted by the mainstream and mass-market in the future.