Enhancing User Experience in Virtual Reality Through Optical Flow Simplification with the Help of Physiological Measurements: Pilot Study

The use of virtual reality (VR) has made significant advancements, and now it is widely used across a range of applications. However, consumers' capacity to fully enjoy VR experiences continues to be limited by a chronic problem known as cybersickness (CS). This study explores the feasibility of mitigating CS through geometric scene simplification combined with electroencephalography (EEG)-based monitoring. According to the sensory conflict theory, this issue is caused by the discrepancy between the visually induced self-motion (VIMS) through immersive displays and the real motion the vestibular system detects. While prior mitigation strategies have largely relied on hardware modifications or visual field restrictions, this paper introduces a novel framework that integrates geometric scene simplification with EEG-based neurophysiological activity to reduce VIMS during VR immersion. The proposed framework combines EEG neurophysiology, allowing us to monitor users' brainwave activity and cognitive states during virtual immersion experience. The empirical evidence from our investigation shows a correlation between CS manifestation and neural activation in the parietal and temporal lobes. As an experiment with 15 subjects, statistical differences were significantly different with P= 0.001 and large effect size η2=0.28, while preliminary trends suggest lower neural activation during simplified scenes. Notably, a decrease in neural activation corresponding to reduced optic flow (OF) suggests that VR environment simplification may help attenuate CS symptoms, providing preliminary support for the proposed strategy.