Katharina Margareta Theresa. Pöhlmann
KITE-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
To prevent motion sickness, Virtual Reality (VR) experiences for vehicle passengers typically present ``matched motion'': real vehicle movements are replicated 1:1 by movements in VR. To expand this design space, we provide foundations for in-car VR experiences that break free from this constraint by manipulating the passenger's visual perception of linear velocity through amplifying and reducing the virtual speed. In two on-the-road studies, we examined the application of Vehicular Translational Gain (1.5-9.5x) and Attenuation (0.66-0.14x) to real car speeds (~50km/h) across two VR tasks (reading and gaming), exploring journey perception, impact on motion sickness, travel experience and tasks. We found that vehicular gain/attenuation can be applied without significantly increasing motion sickness. Gain was more noticeable and affected perceived speed, distance, safety, relaxation and excitement, being well-suited to gaming, while attenuation was more suitable for productivity. Our work unlocks new ways that VR applications can safely enhance and alter the passenger experience through novel perceptual manipulations of vehicle velocity.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642298
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)