Vestibular cues and virtual environments

The vast majority of virtual environments concentrate on constructing a realistic visual simulation while ignoring non-visual environmental cues. Although these missing cues can to some extent be ignored by an operator, the lack of appropriate cues may contribute to cybersickness and may affect operator performance. We examine the role of vestibular cues to self-motion on an operator's sense of self-motion within a virtual environment. We show that the presence of vestibular cues has a very significant effect on an operator's estimate of self-motion. The addition of vestibular cues, however, is not always beneficial.