Papers of the Week

Cybersickness is an array of symptoms associated with exposure to three-dimensional visualization technology (3DVT) environments, such as virtual reality (VR). It is thought that cybersickness is a type of motion sickness caused by a mismatch in sensory and vestibular input when using these modalities. Symptoms of cybersickness are often akin to those of traditional motion sickness, such as headache and nausea. In the literature, as many as 40-60% of VR users report symptoms of cybersickness, though in our laboratory approximately 20% of users report symptoms of cybersickness. Our past research has shown that the physical environment is often preferred by students, and more effective for learning anatomy, compared to 3DVT environments. We hypothesize that the preference for, and effectiveness of, the physical environment over 3DVT may be a result of cybersickness due to the isolation of the learner from the physical environment. However, no direct measurements of cybersickness or comparisons between 3DVT environments in anatomy are available.