Table 1.
Guidelines for possible individual factors relating to experience with virtual environments (CYB_1 to 4) and users' physical attributes (CYB_5 to 9) influencing cybersickness.
| ID_factor Evidence level | Factors | Description | Guidelines |
|---|---|---|---|
| CYB_1 V | Experience with a real-world task | Familiarity with tasks (real) in VR before being immersed seems to positively influence symptoms (Porcino et al., 2017; Howard and Van Zandt, 2021) | Acclimating users to tasks before immersing in VR could help reduce side effects occurrence (Howard and Van Zandt, 2021) |
| CYB_2 V | Experiences with a simulator (habituation) | Familiarity with immersive experiences drives users to report fewer symptoms (Howard and Van Zandt, 2021) | Acclimating users to immersive technologies before making them work in VR (Howard and Van Zandt, 2021; Szopa and Soares, 2021) |
| CYB_3 VI | Video gameplay | Users referred to as “gamers” are less susceptible to report high symptoms (Collaboration, 2015; Lanier et al., 2019; Kaplan et al., 2020; Szopa and Soares, 2021; Theresa Pöhlmann et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2021) | Encouraging potential users to play 3D video games to acclimate them to movements (Rebenitsch and Owen, 2021) on a screen they could encounter in VR |
| CYB_4 III | Duration | Cybersickness occurrence is linearly correlated with exposure duration (Duzmańska et al., 2018; Muthukrishna and Henrich, 2019; Rebenitsch and Owen, 2021) | Making short sessions at the beginning and increasing immersion time if users are building habituation. Cybersickness can arise after 5 min especially with very inducing contents (Anses, 2021) |
| CYB_5 VI | Eye dominance | “Eye dominance refers to the preference to use one eye more than the fellow eye to accomplish a task” (Ooi and He, 2020). It also seems to apply to binocular stimuli (Han et al., 2018). By stimulating both eyes equally or unequally, some peers think it can mitigate cybersickness (Meng et al., 2020; Hussain et al., 2021) | Eye-dominance-guided foveated rendering could help reduce non-necessary stimuli on the non-dominant eye, reducing symptoms occurrence (Meng et al., 2020; Hussain et al., 2021) |
| CYB_6 VI | Stereoscopic visual ability | See VF_2 | See VF_2 |
| CYB_7 V | Postural stability | Unstable (posture) users are more likely to become sick in line with Postural instability theory of cybersickness (Risi and Palmisano, 2019a; Stanney et al., 2020b). Although experimental results can sometimes contradict this prediction (Dennison and D'Zmura, 2017, 2018; Arcioni et al., 2019; Risi and Palmisano, 2019b; Kim J. et al., 2021; Litleskare, 2021) | Use questionnaires to determine if users are susceptible to postural instability to adapt exposure to him/her (Risi and Palmisano, 2019a; Stanney et al., 2020b; Howard and Van Zandt, 2021) |
| CYB_8 VI | History of headaches/migraines | Migraine (and Vestibular Migraine) history can predict part of cybersickness symptoms (Wang and Lewis, 2016; Paroz and Potter, 2017; Lim et al., 2018; Stanney et al., 2020a; MacArthur et al., 2021) | Determining if the user has a history of headaches or migraines to adapt exposure to him/her with questionnaires such as Visually Induced Motion Sickness Susceptibility Questionnaire (Keshavarz et al., 2021) |
| CYB_9 VII | Body mass index | The lower the body mass, the higher the reported symptoms (Stanney et al., 2003a, 2020a) | Determining user height and weight (questionnaire) and adapting exposure strategy (shorter duration, more pre-exposure before real work tasks) if more susceptible to present symptoms (Stanney et al., 2020a) |