title: Cybersickness without the wobble: Experimental results speak against postural instability theory.
abstract: It has been suggested that postural instability is necessary for cybersickness to occur. Seated and standing subjects used a head-mounted display to view a virtual tunnel that rotated about their line of sight. We found that the offset direction of perceived vertical settings matched the direction of the tunnel's rotation, so replicating earlier findings. Increasing rotation speed caused cybersickness to increase, but had no significant impact on perceived vertical settings. Postural sway during rotation was similar to postural sway during rest. While a minority of subjects exhibited postural sway in response to the onset of tunnel rotation, the majority did not. Furthermore, cybersickness increased with rotation speed similarly for the seated and standing conditions. Finally, subjects with greater levels of cybersickness exhibited less variation in postural sway. These results lead us to conclude that the link between postural instability and cybersickness is a weak one in the present experiment.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive NeuroSystems Laboratory, University of California, Irvine, Department of Cognitive Sciences, Irvine, CA, USA. Electronic address: mdenniso@uci.edu.
authors.forename: Mark Stephen
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Dennison
authors.affiliation: Cognitive NeuroSystems Laboratory, University of California, Irvine, Department of Cognitive Sciences, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: D'Zmura
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003221:Confusion / Q000209:etiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009041:Motion Sickness / Q000209:etiology*; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology; D009325:Nausea / Q000209:etiology; D004856:Postural Balance / Q000502:physiology*; D011187:Posture / Q000502:physiology*; D012399:Rotation; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cybersickness; Perceived vertical; Postural instability; Vection; Virtual reality; Visually induced motion sickness