Optical correction reduces simulator sickness B Bridgeman |
|---|
Psychology, University of California, CA, United States
|
| Prolonged work in driving simulators or virtual-reality environments is often complicated by simulator sickness, a feeling of nausea that can interfere with performance. Extensive work has been done on vestibular contributions to simulator sickness, but little attention has gone to visual contributions. A possible source of discomfort is the mismatch between distance to the screen in a driving simulator (56cm in our case of a 50° wide display) and depicted distances. We correct accomodation to slightly under infinity with +1.75 diopter spherical lenses. This correction, however, distorts the accomodative convergence to accomodation (AC/A) ratio, so we also introduce prisms to make parallel lines of sight converge at the screen distance. Subjects wore optometric test frames with spherical and prism correction in each eye, and drove for 40 minutes on a long figure-8 course with several driving environments. Control subjects wore the same test frames with two lenses in each eye that summed to 0 diopters, with no prism, to control for demand effects of wearing frames. Every 10 minutes they were asked for a vection and a comfort rating. Mann-Whitney U-tests showed significantly less discomfort in the correction condition, but vection ratings were the same in both groups. |
| Up Home |
|---|