Dynamically Adjusted and Peripheral Visualization of Reverse Optical Flow for VR Sickness Reduction

Abstract

Sickness is a major obstacle in the wide adoption of virtual reality (VR). Providing low-resolution peripheral “countervection” visualization could mitigate VR sickness. Herein, we present an extension/improvement to this work, in which the reverse optical flow of the scene features is mixed in, and the extent of the periphery is dynamically adjusted simultaneously. We comparatively evaluated the effects of our extension versus the two notable sickness reduction techniques, (1) the original peripheral countervection flow using the simple stripe pattern (with a fixed field of view and peripheral extent) and (2) the dynamic field of view adjustment (with no added visualization). The experimental results indicated that the proposed extension exhibits competitive or better sickness reduction effects and less user-perceived content intrusion, distraction, and breaks in immersion/presence. Furthermore, we tested the comparative effect of visualizing the reverse optical flow only in the lower visual periphery, which further reduced the content intrusion and lowered the sense of immersion and presence. The test indicated that using just the low visual periphery could achieve a comparable level of sickness reduction with significantly less computational effort, making it suitable for mobile applications.