RelaxVR: Cybersickness Reduction in Immersive Virtual Reality Through Explainable AI and Large Language Models

Virtual reality (VR) systems are susceptible to cybersickness, significantly hindering user immersion. Very recently, researchers introduced explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) enabled methods for detecting and explaining cybersickness features. Since XAI methods can identify the dominant features causing cybersickness, we argue that this knowledge can also guide the dynamic adoption of effective cybersickness reduction strategies, unlike state-of-the-art static approaches that rely on fixed methods. This paper introduces a new dataset MazeSick and RelaxVR, an interactive XAI-guided VR cybersickness reduction framework to predict, explain, and reduce cybersickness. Specifically, we propose an innovative XAI-guided cybersickness reduction engine, which selects the most appropriate reduction technique based on XAI-provided feature importance scores from a cybersickness reduction library of different reduction techniques. We also design an interactive dialogue system powered by large language models, enabling users to engage in the VR simulation via voice commands to understand the reasoning of cybersickness and select effective reduction strategies through natural language interaction. We deployed RelaxVR on a consumer-grade VR headset (e.g., HTC VIVE Pro) and validated it through a user study on cybersickness evaluation, where participants were immersed in a custom-built VR Maze simulation. Our results demonstrate that RelaxVR effectively reduces cybersickness with minimal impact on immersion, and 94% of the users agreed that RelaxVR is highly effective for reducing cybersickness and easier to use through the dialogue engine for selecting effective reduction strategies.