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An Evaluation of Extrapolation and Filtering Techniques in Head Tracking for Virtual Environments to Reduce Cybersickness

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Serious Games (JCSG 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10622))

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Abstract

Currently, numerous users who employ HMD devices such as the Oculus Rift develop symptoms similar to motion sickness. Recent literature defines this phenomenon as cybersickness, and one of its main causes as latency. This contribution aims to analyze the accuracy of different extrapolation and filtering techniques to accurately predict head movements, reducing the impact of latency. For this purpose, 10 participants played a VR game that required quick and subsequent head rotations, during which a total of 150.000 head positions were captured in the pitch and yaw rotation axes. These rotational movements were then extrapolated and filtered. Linear extrapolation seems to provide best results, with a prediction error of approximately 0.06 arc degrees. Filtering the extrapolated data further reduces the error to 0.04 arc degrees on average. In conclusion, until future VR systems can significantly reduce latency, extrapolating head movements seems to provide a low-cost solution with an acceptable prediction error, although extrapolating the roll axis movements remains to be challenging.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Deck13.de.

  2. 2.

    Ktxsoftware.com.

  3. 3.

    Unrealengine.com.

  4. 4.

    Github.com/EverNewJoy/VictoryPlugin.

  5. 5.

    Oculus.com/dk2.

  6. 6.

    Mathworks.com.

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Acknowledgements

This project employed funds from LOEWE Hessen Modellprojekte (State Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence of Hessen), in the framework of HA project 480/15-22.

All devices employed during this study were acquired with funds from the Hochschulpakt 2020 program of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The authors report no conflict of interest for this publication.

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Correspondence to Augusto Garcia-Agundez .

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Garcia-Agundez, A., Westmeier, A., Caserman, P., Konrad, R., Göbel, S. (2017). An Evaluation of Extrapolation and Filtering Techniques in Head Tracking for Virtual Environments to Reduce Cybersickness. In: Alcañiz, M., Göbel, S., Ma, M., Fradinho Oliveira, M., Baalsrud Hauge, J., Marsh, T. (eds) Serious Games. JCSG 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10622. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70111-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70111-0_19

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