Impact of Different Role Types and Gender on Presence and Cybersickness in Immersive Virtual Reality Setups

Abstract

Several factors have been identified to contribute to the sense of presence and cybersickness, including the preponderance users have in the virtual environments (VE) and their gender. This work focuses on studying the Role Type and gender in a VE and their impact on the sense of presence and cybersickness when immersive Virtual Reality (VR) setups are used. For this, a set of psychophysical experiments were conducted to evaluate a VR scenario with three Role Types: Viewer, Explorer, and Searcher. Results revealed statistically significant differences in Spatial Presence, Cybersickness, Nausea, Oculomotor Discomfort, and Disorientation for Role Type. In the evaluated scenario, it was observed that a more dominant Role Type on the VE leads to a higher reported spatial presence (sense of physically being present in the VE) and higher cybersickness scores. We conclude that a higher relevance of the Role Type makes the users more sensitive to the stimuli present in the VE regarding the coherency of the interaction/simulation and, consequently, more prone to develop cybersickness symptoms. No differences were found between the genders.