Simulator Sickness Assessment for \(360^\circ \) Videos

While viewing \(360^\circ \) videos on an HMD, users may experience symptoms of simulator sickness (or cybersickness) such as nausea, dizziness, vertigo, sweating, etc. (Kennedy et al (1993) Int J Aviat Psychol 3(3):203–220). Simulator sickness may occur during and after exposure to a Virtual Environment (VE). Hence, for a holistic picture of omnidirectional video QoE, simulator sickness should be monitored during respective tests. For the self-evaluation of simulator sickness, various long and short simulator sickness questionnaires were discussed in Sect. 2.5.2. In the following, the terms “Cybersickness” and “Simulator Sickness” will be used interchangeably. In this chapter, the main aim is to investigate the impact of different influencing factors such as video resolution, bitrate, session duration, and latency on cybersickness. At present, practically no solution exists that can efficiently eradicate the symptoms of simulator sickness from virtual environments. Therefore, in the absence of a solution, it is required to quantify and predict the amount of sickness associated with a given VE, or as investigated in this book, \(360^\circ \) video viewing. Hence, another objective of this chapter is to present initial work on a Simulator Sickness Model SiSiMo, including a first component to predict simulator sickness scores over time. Using linear regression of short-term scores already shows promising performance for predicting the scores collected from a number of user tests.