- Title
- Clinical and physiological characteristics of cybersickness
- Creator
- Mazloumi Gavgani, Alireza
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- In the last two decades there have been substantial advances in the development of virtual reality (VR) technology for various applications such as entertainment, education and training. However, limited knowledge is available about the side effects of this technology including cybersickness - a form of motion sickness that is caused by immersion in VR. My present study is aimed at providing an insight into cybersickness in order to better understand the physiological characteristics of this averse phenomenon. In this study, a total of 79 healthy volunteers (41 females, 38 males) were exposed to cybersickness provoking VR content (virtual ride on a rollercoaster using Oculus Rift head-mounted display) in four independent research experiments. In the first experiment (described in Chapter 2), we investigated the symptom profile of cybersickness and explored if desensitization can occur with repetitive exposure. We found that gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea are the most common symptoms associated with cybersickness followed by other - central, peripheral and sopite-like symptoms. We found that these symptoms can last over 3 hours after exposure. Our results clearly demonstrate that repetitive exposure to virtual environments can result in habituation to cybersickness. Our findings demonstrate that forehead sweating increases significantly with increasing nausea and therefore, forehead sweating can be a reliable biomarker for cybersickness in general and nausea in particular. In the second experiment (described in Chapter 3), we examined the effects of visual content on the intensity of cybersickness symptoms. We found that changes in the direction of visual flow of the same VR content has a significant effect on the severity of sickness such that moving forward in a virtual environment is more provocative than moving backward. In the third experiment (described in Chapter 4), two different imaging modalities were used to analyse brain hemodynamic during cybersickness. We found that cybersickness is associated with variations in brain activity (region-specific increases and decreases) in a complex network in numerous cortical regions related to the cognitive, evaluative and sensory discriminative aspects of this syndrome. Our results demonstrate that overall sensitivity to cybersickness was significantly higher in females than males. In the fourth experiment (described in Chapter 5), we compared the subjective symptoms and physiological effects of cybersickness induced by virtual reality and “classic” motion sickness triggered by vestibular stimulation (Coriolis cross-coupling). We found that despite fundamental differences in provoking stimuli, cybersickness and motion sickness are clinically identical. We conclude that cybersickness is a complex syndrome, and that its symptoms and physiological effects are far beyond the common gastrointestinal symptoms. My work represents detailed characterisation of symptoms and physiological changes that accompany cybersickness. The major impact of my work is, firstly, in the identification of a selective and sensitive biomarker that will allow detection, monitoring and quantification of cybersickness in future studies. Secondly, my finding of similarity between cybersickness and “classical” motion sickness opens opportunity for translational work, namely developing of a simple test for assessing motion sickness susceptibility, and a novel approach for motion sickness desensitization.
- Subject
- cybersickness; virtual reality; thesis by publication; symptoms of cybersickness; nausea; desensitization; vestibular system; simulator sickness; motion sickness; physiological response; transcranial doppler ultrasound
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1405200
- Identifier
- uon:35456
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Alireza Mazloumi Gavgani
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 105 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |