CRII: HCC: RUI: Toward Understanding of Virtual Reality Sickness in Children

近年来，虚拟现实（VR）技术变得更加经济实惠，并为各种人群所接受。虚拟现实用户面临的最大挑战之一是虚拟现实病，也被称为晕屏病，用户会出现眼疲劳、头痛、出汗、头痛、迷失方向、眩晕和恶心等症状。虽然导致晕屏的因素和减少晕屏的方法已经在成人身上研究了多年，但儿童越来越频繁地使用VR，他们快速的心理发展可能会影响他们体验晕屏的机制以及症状的类型和严重程度。该项目将通过制定有效的儿童晕机措施，并比较成人和儿童晕机的严重程度和驱动因素，来调查儿童和成人之间可能存在的这些差异。实现这些目标将使团队能够制定指导方针，为儿童开发安全的VR内容，从而扩大能够从VR体验中受益的儿童人数。这项研究是第一个彻底调查儿童晕动症的研究。晕屏病的原因仍有争议，它们对儿童的影响也严重缺乏研究。此外，评估晕机的常用工具，如基于文本的模拟晕机问卷（SSQ），可能不适合用于儿童，因为其中的一些问题（例如，头部丰满度，胃意识等）可能很难让儿童理解。这个项目的第一个目标是实施一个儿童友好的SSQ，通过使用症状动画来增强SSQ，从而利用儿童的视觉技能。视觉问卷与基于文本的SSQ的有效性将作为第一个目标的一部分进行研究，并发布给其他VR研究人员和设计师使用。第二个目标是比较儿童和成人晕机的主观（即SSQ）和生理（包括速率变异性、脑电图和皮肤电反应）测量。最后一个目标是调查虚拟环境中引发儿童晕机的因素。对不同VR环境设计条件下大脑活动的事件相关电位分析将确定它们对晕机的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have become more affordable and accessible to a diverse population in recent years. One of the biggest challenges for VR users is virtual reality sickness, also known as cybersickness, in which users experience symptoms including eyestrain, headache, sweating, fullness of head, disorientation, vertigo, and nausea. Although factors that cause cybersickness, and ways to reduce it, have been studied for many years in adults, children are increasingly frequent VR users whose rapid psychological development may affect both the mechanisms by which they experience cybersickness and the type and severity of the symptoms. This project will investigate these possible differences between children and adults through creating effective measures of cybersickness for children and comparing the severity and drivers of cybersickness between adults and children. Achieving these objectives will allow the team to develop guidelines for developing safe VR content for children that will expand the population of children who are able to benefit from VR experiences. This research is among the first to investigate cybersickness in children thoroughly. The causes of cybersickness are still debatable, and how they affect children is severely understudied. Further, common instruments for assessing cybersickness, such as the text-based simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ), may not be suitable for use with children, as some of its questions (e.g., fullness of head, stomach awareness, etc.) can be difficult for children to comprehend. The first objective of this project is to implement a child-friendly SSQ that leverages children's visual skills by augmenting the SSQ with animations of the symptoms. The effectiveness of the visual questionnaire versus the text-based SSQ will be studied as a part of the first objective and released for use by other VR researchers and designers. The second objective is to compare both subjective (i.e., the SSQ) and physiological (including rate variability, electroencephalograms, and galvanic skin response) measures of cybersickness between children and adults. The last objective is to investigate the factors in a virtual environment that trigger cybersickness in children. An event-related potential analysis of the brain activity in different VR environmental design conditions will identify their effects on cybersickness.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.