Study of Cybersickness in Augmented Reality Railway Inspections Applications

The development of augmented reality (AR) has brought innovation to the working mode in multiple fields to improve the efficiency of multi-party cooperation and the safety rate of operations. However, when users use AR technology, they will inevitably suffer from cybersickness, which may cause symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, eye fatigue, and headaches, severely reducing their experience. Still, there is limited research on AR cybersickness, compared to cybersickness in virtual reality (VR). The causes and symptoms of cybersickness in AR and VR are different, therefore some conclusions in VR may not be applicable. Also, the current research scenarios related to AR cybersickness lack diversity, which is not conducive to the study of the causes of cybersickness. The paper mainly studies the cybersickness in AR railway inspection scenarios, including the causes (latency and the number of interactions) and the symptoms. 54 volunteers were recruited for the experiment, and we defined three latency types and three interaction types based on related interaction criteria. Then we designed a 3 * 3 experiment with latency and interaction quantity as variables. We conducted statistical analysis on the ARSQ data and experimental data. The results show that the severity of cybersickness in AR railway inspections is significantly positively correlated with the number of interactions and latency. Oculomotor is also significantly correlated with the two variables, while the severity of disorientation is not significantly correlated with latency. Besides, it was also observed that in AR, the severity of oculomotor is much higher than disorientation.