The Effect of Directional Airflow toward Vection and Cybersickness

Employing airflow feedback is an effective means of enriching the virtual reality experience multimodally. Most interestingly, there have been conflicting reports of its effect on cybersickness. For example, some research has found that the airflow can be felt as refreshment and ease cybersickness, while others seen it as promoting the sense of vection and worsening the sickness symptoms. We present a comprehensive experimental study to clarify and investigate the deeper mechanism of the effect of directional airflow on cybersickness and user experience in virtual navigation. Our findings indicated that the airflow consistent with the navigation direction can strengthen the sense of vection, while no effect was observed for the inconsistent. On the other hand, regardless of the direction, the refreshing effect of the airflow was significant, resulting in the overall decreased level of cybersickness. Such a result can help us design the virtual navigation experience with higher dynamism and lesser extent of sickness symptoms.