Title: The influence of individual characteristics and adaptation on cybersickness
Abstract: Cybersickness remains a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR). I describe research from my lab exploring the relationship between cybersickness and individual characteristics, including gender, interpupillary distance, and history of motion sickness. I also present results from adaptation experiments measuring cybersickness experienced across four days of VR exposure. These studies address the mechanisms of adaptation, whether adaptation generalizes across experiences, and whether adaptation could be an acceptable solution for the problem of cybersickness.
Bio: Dr. Jonathan Kelly is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University, where he also participates in the Human-Computer Interaction graduate program. Prior to joining Iowa State in 2009, Dr. Kelly earned his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and conducted postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Kelly's research interests include virtual reality (VR), cybersickness, navigation, space perception, and spatial cognition. His work uses virtual reality to study basic theories of spatial cognition and leverages psychological theories to study and improve upon user experiences in VR. Recently, his work has explored how cybersickness is influenced by characteristics of the individual (e.g., gender, interpupillary distance), interaction with the virtual environment, and prior experience with VR.