Virtual Reality Self Induced Cybersickness: An Exploratory Study

Virtual reality (VR) has been used successfully in several studies, namely in the area of safety warnings design. However, regarding cybersickness, this technology it is not innocuous. We report results concerning cybersickness related with awareness of the secondary effects of VR before doing an experiment. Two groups of participant were found. A group that read the consent form (CF) with attention and a group that did not pay attention to the CF and just signed it. The consent contained information about the experiment and also an alert on the secondary effects of VR. In the VR experiment, participants were asked to accomplish a task in a virtual environment (VE) related with other study. Findings suggest that for those who read the consent form carefully, thus, were more aware about VR side effects, there were more symptoms of cybersickness and more withdraws. These reported results rise some practical and also ethical issues related with VR experiments that are discussed in this paper.