DEVELOPMENT OF VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT TO ENHANCE USER EXPERIENCE WITH THE HELP OF ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY

Abstract

The use of virtual reality (VR) has made significant advancements, and now it’s widely used across a range of applications. However, consumers’ capacity to fully enjoy VR experiences continues to be limited by a chronic problem known as cybersickness. This issue is caused by the stark discrepancy between the self-motion the vis-ual system perceives through immersive displays and the real motion the vestibular system detects. According to the sensory conflict theory, this mismatch between visual and vestibular cues leads to feelings of sickness and discomfort. This paper presents an initial techniques and framework to reduce the visually induced self-motion in virtual scenes using geometric simplification approaches. The primary goal is to reduce the amount of optic flow experienced by user during the interaction with the virtual environment in a controlled laboratory setup. The proposed framework combines EEG neurofeedback with virtual reality, allowing users’ brain wave activity and cognitive states to be monitored and assessed throughout VR encounters. The empirical evidence amassed from our investigation delineates a significant correlation between the manifestation of cybersickness and en-hanced neural activation within the parietal and temporal lobes. These findings were consistently manifested under two experimental conditions—non simplification and geometrical simplification within the virtual reality (VR) environment. Notably, the observed decrement in activation intensity when employing geometrical simpli-fication substantiates the effectiveness of our VR environment simplification strategy in the attenuation of cy-bersickness.