Geometric simplification for reducing optic flow in VR

Abstract

Today virtual reality (VR) technologies became more and more widespread and found strong applications in various domains. However the fear to experience motion sickness is still an important barrier for new VR users. Instead of moving physically, VR users experience virtual locomotion but their vestibular systems do not sense the self-motion that are visually induced by immersive displays. The mismatch in visual and vestibular senses causes sickness. Previous solutions actively reduce user’s field-of-view, introduce intruder in the view or alter their navigation. In this paper we propose a passive approach that partially simplify the virtual environment according to user navigation. One manual simplification approach has been proposed and prototyped to simplify the scene seen in the peripheral field of view. The optic flow is analyzed on the rendered images seen by users. The result shows that the simplification reduces the perceived optic flow which is the main cause of the visually induced motion sickness (VIMS). This pilot study confirm the potential efficiency of reducing cybersickness through geometric simplification.