Virtual Reality(VR) Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) have brought forth innumerable opportunities for much that is unknown on the topic, especially regarding how cybersickness affects and is affected by each 9 application of VR. This topic collection has collected five thought-provoking articles that help shed some 10 further light on the issue of cybersickness. We divided this editorial into two, based on papers reporting (1) 11 mechanisms of cybersickness and (2) its mitigation in applications.
Understanding the mechanisms behind cybersickness is vital to be able to identify solutions to mitigate or 13 eliminate it. Some apparent smaller changes, like how the sense of self-motion is triggered, can influence anchoring the text to earth to reduce the disjunction between felt and observed movement. They created a 39 simulation with a moving platform and observed that for those who had the book tethered to earth, the 40 levels of discomfort were lower than for those who read the text bound to the HMD. Could this approach 41 be a solution for consuming 2D VR content in movement? More research is still needed to answer this 42 question.
Adhanom et al. focused on a more general approach to reducing cybersickness. They investigated if it 44 would be possible to carry over the adaptation from one abstract virtual environment to another naturalistic 45 one. In other words, they investigated if it was possible to train participants not to get cybersick. Their 46 results were promising and stand out even more after we observed that other variations in inputs (Teixeira et al. and Sepich et al.), can have significant differences in cybersickness outcomes and that the adaptation 48 from one naturalistic environment does not necessarily translate to another Palmisano and Constable (2022).
Though more research is needed, it is encouraging to imagine that by identifying the ideal abstractions, 50 some general training might be possible in the future.
In summary, these articles show us the importance of defining our baseline well when studying 52 cybersickness because even changing parts of a task might be a confounding factor. For example, when 53 testing a mitigation technique, one should not alter the level of difficulty of the task or change from a 54 passive to an active controller role. Moreover, when testing techniques, the order is important as VR 55 adaptation might transcend scenarios, and some techniques can be helpful in specific environments Shi
