Capability of Virtual Environments to Meet Military Requirements
Abstract
The DoD and NASA are considering virtual environment (VE) technology for use in forward deployable and remote training devices. Yet, many of these VE devices, particularly those which employ helmet-mounted displays, ha"ve an adverse effect on users, eliciting motion sickness and other sequelae (e.g., Pausch, Crca, & Conway, 1992; Kennedy, Lane, Lilienthal, Berhaum, & Hettinger, 1992). These symptoms, now called cybersickness (McCauley & Sharkey, 1992), could retard development of VE technology and limit its use as a training tool. Motion sickness is known to be polysymptomatic and in scoring self-reports we have found there to be reliably different profiles of sickness in simulators, at sea, in space, and in VP (Kennedy, Lane, Berbaum, & Lilienthal, 1993). Furthermore, recent research in our laboratories implies that cybersickness may involve multiple functional pathways. The first pathway is related to ill-effects upon the autonomic nervous system or ANS (Money, Lackner, & Cheung, 1996). According to sensory conflict theory (Reason & Brand, 1975), the ANS is provoked when sensory inputs from the visual auditory, vestibular, or somatoceptots are uncorrelated or incompatible. This is the case when one is exposed to the certain sensory rearrangements in a virtual environment. Such rearrangements can trigger the "emetic brain response" (Oman, 1991), causing vomiting, perspiration, nausea, pallor, salivation, and drowsiness.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADP010618
Entities
People
- Ben D. Lawson
- Kay M. Stanney
- Robert S. Kennedy