Early eye movements reveal how cybersickness develops in VR
How Early Can You Tell? Early Eye Gaze Dynamics and Cybersickness Progression in Virtual Reality
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Feeling sick in virtual reality (VR) can happen differently for everyone, making it hard to predict. The authors studied whether eye movement patterns in the first few minutes of VR use could show who might get more uncomfortable later. They found that people whose eyes moved around more widely early on tended to feel worse as time went on, but this did not predict how bad their sickness would be at the end. This helps us understand how VR sickness builds up by looking at eye behavior early in the experience.
What this means in practice
- •For vr headset developers: Identify early gaze patterns to monitor and potentially reduce user discomfort during VR sessions.
- •For virtual reality content creators: Adapt VR experiences in real time based on initial eye movement data to improve comfort for users.
Authors
Nevzat Umut Demirseren, Isayas Berhe Adhanom
Abstract
Cybersickness remains one of the primary barriers to prolonged and comfortable virtual reality (VR) use, yet the temporal development of cybersickness remains poorly understood because its onset and progression vary substantially across individuals. Eye tracking provides a continuous and unobtrusive measure of user behavior, making it well suited for investigating how users respond throughout VR exposure. However, existing work has mainly focused on aggregate gaze measures or post-exposure assessments, leaving the relationship between early eye-movement dynamics and discomfort progression underexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether early eye-movement dynamics characterize the subsequent progression of cybersickness. Using trajectories of fixation duration, fixation dispersion, saccade amplitude, saccade velocity, and gaze eccentricity computed over the first one to five minutes of VR exposure, we evaluate their association with subsequent discomfort progression and compare early gaze dynamics between participants with low and high post-exposure cybersickness severity. Our results show that early fixation dispersion is consistently associated with subsequent discomfort progression, whereas no significant differences are observed between cybersickness severity groups. These findings suggest that early fixation dispersion can characterize the progression of discomfort rather than the final cybersickness severity. Overall, this work provides new insight into the temporal relationship between early eye-movement behavior and cybersickness progression, contributing to the understanding of gaze dynamics during immersive experiences.