Cybersickness remains a major barrier to the widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR) technologies, motivating researchers to investigate its causes and mitigation strategies through comparative human-subjects studies. These experiments may employ either within- or between-subjects designs. Although within-subjects designs require fewer participants and potentially offer higher statistical power, researchers need to wash out carryover effects of cybersickness symptoms before each session to avoid confounding the results. Prior studies have employed washout periods of varying lengths; some required testing conditions on different days, while others allowed only short breaks of less than 15 minutes. Although shorter washout periods are more convenient for experimenters, their impact on study outcomes has not been systematically investigated. In this work, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the effects of study design and washout period length on cybersickness self-reports measured with the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). We found that short washout periods reduce statistical power compared to long washout periods or between-subjects designs. Based on these findings, we provide guidelines to help researchers design more reliable cybersickness studies and improve the generalizability of their results.

This paper quantitatively investigates the feasibility of, and merit in, soliciting continuous subjective cybersickness ratings as participants passively engage in an immersive VR experience. The main research questions addressed are: (1) Feasibility: To what extent will participants successfully engage, unprompted, in continuous cybersickness reporting while engaging with a secondary task? and (2) Merit: To what extent do continuously reported subjective cybersickness ratings offer valuable insights beyond what can be obtained from less frequent querying?

Interactions with the physical environment, such as passive haptic feedback, have been previously shown to provide richer and more immersive virtual reality experiences. A strict correspondence between the virtual and real world coordinate systems is a staple requirement for physical interaction. However, many of the commonly employed VR locomotion techniques allow for, or even require, this relationship to change as the experience progresses. The outcome is that experience designers frequently have to choose between flexible locomotion or physical interactivity, as the two are often mutually exclusive. To address this limitation, this paper introduces reactive environmental alignment, a novel framework that leverages redirected walking techniques to achieve a desired configuration of the virtual and real world coordinate systems. This approach can transition the system from a misaligned state to an aligned state, thereby enabling the user to interact with physical proxy objects or passive haptic surfaces. Simulation-based experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of reactive alignment and provide insight into the mechanics and potential applications of the proposed algorithm. In the future, reactive environmental alignment can enhance the interactivity of virtual reality systems and inform new research vectors that combine redirected walking and passive haptics.

With recent advances in hardware technology, drones are increasingly present in research activities outside of robotics, performing a multitude of tasks such as image capture and sample collection. However, user interfaces for task-oriented drones have not kept pace with hardware breakthroughs. Current planning and control interfaces for drones are not intuitive and often place a large cognitive burden on those who are not highly trained in their use. This paper proposes a course of research that seeks to leverage natural user interfaces in augmented reality (AR) for controlling drones completing task-oriented objectives.

With recent advances in hardware technology, autonomous robots are increasingly present in research activities outside of robotics, performing a multitude of tasks such as image capture and sample collection. However, user interfaces for task-oriented robots have not kept pace with hardware breakthroughs. Current planning and control interfaces for robots are not intuitive and often place a large cognitive burden on those who are not highly trained in their use. Augmented reality (AR) has also seen major advances in recent years. This demonstration illustrates an initial system design for an AR user interface for path planning with robotics.

Motion sickness is a potentially debilitating side effect experienced by certain users of virtual reality systems. Unexpected results from a user study on redirected walking suggest that there is a need to quickly identify participants who have an extremely low tolerance for virtual motion manipulations and remove them from the experience. In this poster, we investigate the use of a previously introduced “fast motion sickness” measure to identify potential outliers with heightened levels of sensitivity. This work demonstrates a promising experimental methodology and suggests possible shared characteristics among users in this group.

Redirected walking algorithms require the prediction of human motion in order to effectively steer users away from the boundaries of the physical space. While a virtual walking trajectory may be represented using straight lines connecting waypoints of interest, this simple model does not accurately represent typical user behavior. In this poster we present a more realistic walking model for use in real-time virtual environments that employ redirection techniques. We implemented the model within a framework that can be used for simulation of redirected walking within different virtual and physical environments. Such simulations are useful for the evaluation of redirected walking algorithms and the tuning of parameters under varying conditions. Additionally, the model can also be used to animate an artificial humanoid “ghost walker” to provide a visual demonstration of redirected walking in virtual reality.