Dan Cosley
$174,835
The College of New Jersey
New Jersey
Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)
Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have become more affordable and accessible to a diverse population in recent years. One of the biggest challenges for VR users is virtual reality sickness, also known as cybersickness, in which users experience symptoms including eyestrain, headache, sweating, fullness of head, disorientation, vertigo, and nausea. Although factors that cause cybersickness, and ways to reduce it, have been studied for many years in adults, children are increasingly frequent VR users whose rapid psychological development may affect both the mechanisms by which they experience cybersickness and the type and severity of the symptoms. This project will investigate these possible differences between children and adults through creating effective measures of cybersickness for children and comparing the severity and drivers of cybersickness between adults and children. Achieving these objectives will allow the team to develop guidelines for developing safe VR content for children that will expand the population of children who are able to benefit from VR experiences.<br/> <br/>This research is among the first to investigate cybersickness in children thoroughly. The causes of cybersickness are still debatable, and how they affect children is severely understudied. Further, common instruments for assessing cybersickness, such as the text-based simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ), may not be suitable for use with children, as some of its questions (e.g., fullness of head, stomach awareness, etc.) can be difficult for children to comprehend. The first objective of this project is to implement a child-friendly SSQ that leverages children's visual skills by augmenting the SSQ with animations of the symptoms. The effectiveness of the visual questionnaire versus the text-based SSQ will be studied as a part of the first objective and released for use by other VR researchers and designers. The second objective is to compare both subjective (i.e., the SSQ) and physiological (including rate variability, electroencephalograms, and galvanic skin response) measures of cybersickness between children and adults. The last objective is to investigate the factors in a virtual environment that trigger cybersickness in children. An event-related potential analysis of the brain activity in different VR environmental design conditions will identify their effects on cybersickness.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.