Securing Virtual Reality Experiences: Unveiling and Tackling Cybersickness Attacks with Explainable AI

The synergy between virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI), specifically deep learning (DL)-based cybersickness detection models, has ushered in unprecedented advancements in immersive experiences by automatically detecting cybersickness severity and adaptively various mitigation techniques, offering a smooth and comfortable VR experience. While this DL-enabled cybersickness detection method provides promising solutions for enhancing user experiences, it also introduces new risks since these models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks; a small perturbation of the input data that is visually undetectable to human observers can fool the cybersickness detection model and trigger unexpected mitigation, thus disrupting user immersive experiences (UIX) and even posing safety risks. In this paper, we present a new type of VR attack, specifically a cybersickness attack, which successfully prevents the triggering of cybersickness mitigation by deceiving DL-based cybersickness detection models and significantly hinders the UIX. Next, we propose a novel explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)-guided cybersickness attack detection framework to detect such attacks in VR, ensuring UIX and a comfortable VR experience. We evaluate the proposed attack and detection framework using two state-of-the-art open-source VR cybersickness datasets: the Simulation 2021 dataset and the Gameplay dataset. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we implement the attack and the XAI-based detection using a custom-built testbed with a VR roller coaster simulation, utilizing an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset, and conduct a user study. Our study shows that such an attack can dramatically hinder the UIX. However, our proposed XAI-guided cybersickness attack detection can successfully detect cybersickness attacks and trigger the proper mitigation, effectively reducing VR cybersickness.