Mixing in Reverse Optical Flow to Mitigate Vection and Simulation Sickness in Virtual Reality

Simulator sickness has been one of the major obstacles toward making virtual reality (VR) widely accepted and used.

In this demo, study, we showcase a method to reduce simulator sickness by visually mixing the optical flow patterns that are in the reverse direction of the virtual visual motion.

As visual motion is mainly detected and perceived by the optical flow, artificial mixing in the reverse flow is hypothesized to induce a cancellation effect, thereby reducing the degree of the conflict with the vestibular sense and sickness. We developed a real-time algorithm to visualize the reverse optical flow.

In the demo, navigational VR contents will be run in both as-is (original) and with the reverse optical flow mixed in, thereby allowing to experience the sickness reduction effect first hand.