Rotation Blurring: Use of Artificial Blurring to Reduce Cybersickness in Virtual Reality First Person Shooters

Users of Virtual Reality (VR) systems often experience vection, the perception of self-motion in the absence of any physical movement. While vection helps to improve presence in VR, it often leads to a form of motion sickness called cybersickness. Cybersickness is a major deterrent to large scale adoption of VR. Prior work has discovered that changing vection (changing the perceived speed or moving direction) causes more severe cybersickness than steady vection (walking at a constant speed or in a constant direction). Based on this idea, we try to reduce the cybersickness caused by character movements in a First Person Shooter (FPS) game in VR. We propose Rotation Blurring (RB), uniformly blurring the screen during rotational movements to reduce cybersickness. We performed a user study to evaluate the impact of RB in reducing cybersickness. We found that the blurring technique led to an overall reduction in sickness levels of the participants and delayed its onset. Participants who experienced acute levels of cybersickness benefited significantly from this technique.