Towards Neurotechnology to mitigate virtual reality motion sickness in susceptible individuals

Vehicle travel is at the beginning of a transformation to increasing levels of automation, which ultimately will involve fully autonomous vehicles where everyone in the vehicle is a passenger. To enable this travelling time to be productive and entertaining there is currently great activity underway to develop Virtual Reality (VR) media that would enable access to the burgeoning metaverse and associated applications.

One notable issue in this pathway to the future is that around 20% of individuals will experience some form of virtual reality motion sickness (VRMS), and this is compounded by the substantial proportion of individuals who might also experience motion sickness. To address this problem, the labs of Professor Pollick and Brewster have been collaborating to devise means to mitigate motion sickness arising from virtual reality.

This research has examined the effectiveness of different forms of neurotechnology for mitigating VRMS, including EEG, bone-conduction vibration, and transcranial electrical stimulation (tDCS & tACS).

In the proposed PhD research we wish to further advance our understanding of VRMS. We will perform brain imaging experiments to better understand the neural basis of VRMS and use these findings to refine the mitigation protocols arising from our previous research. The research will be guided by the theories of sensory mismatch and vestibular cognition and will include four components:

1) Design and perform applied neuroscience experiment to examine different components of vestibular cognition as it relates to VRMS 2) Adapt the findings from (1) to evaluate current behavioural measures of VRMS susceptibility

3) Further use the findings from (1) to perform a proof-of-concept study in the lab to show that the principles obtained can be used to enhance mitigation of VRMS 4) In-vehicle study that tests mitigation in an ecologically valid situation.