Monocular Viewing Protects Against Cybersickness Produced by Head Movements in the Oculus Rift

Abstract

We compared the cybersickness produced when a virtual environment (VE) was viewed binocularly and monocularly through an Oculus Rift CV1 head-mounted display (HMD). During each exposure to the VE participants made continuous yaw head movements in time with a computer-generated metronome. Across trials we also varied their head movement frequency (0.5 or 1.0 Hz) and motion-to-photon delays (from ∼5 - ∼212 ms). We found that: 1) cybersickness severity increased with added display lag; and 2) monocular viewing appeared to protect against these increases in cybersickness. We conclude that active binocular viewing with this HMD introduced artifacts that increased the likelihood of more severe sickness.