Mitigating cybersickness from the consumption of Virtual Reality in moving vehicles
Supervisors:
PhD Project Summary:
Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to change many activities, enabling new forms of entertainment, education, and interaction. However, an obstacle to acceptance of VR is that some individuals can experience feelings of nausea and discomfort, a phenomenon known as cybersickness. In this research we are interested in the scenario where cybersickness arises due to consuming VR in moving vehicles. This has relevance because vehicle travel is at the beginning of a transformation to high levels of automation that ultimately will lead to autonomous vehicles where everyone in the vehicle is a passenger. This PhD complements other activity in our lab aimed at the development of mitigation techniques for cybersickness. We plan the PhD student to first use brain imaging to explore vestibular cognition and potential mechanisms responsible for cybersickness. From this the student will adapt existing mitigation techniques that employ neurostimulation and perform experiments in the lab and in moving vehicles that explore new ways to mitigate cybersickness.