Reorient the Gazed Scene Towards the Center: Novel Virtual Turning Using Head and Gaze Motions and Blink

Stationary subjects exposed to compelling scene movements in virtual reality environments often experience symptoms of visually induced motion sickness (cybersickness). This study specifically focuses on virtual turning and evaluates user experience in the task of searching and collecting objects appeared around the player in the first-person view. Typical conventional control schemes for turning includes the smooth and snap turns. The smooth turn is continuous turning performed by moving a scene in the horizontal direction. In this case, reflexive eye movement occurs even in the absence of physical motion, which often causes eye strain and nausea. The snap turn achieves a prompt direction change by omitting intervening turning, which often damages the sense of reality. To address these negative effects, we propose the novel turning method inspired by the particular human behavior, which achieves to reorient the gazed view towards the center. Prompt reorientation during rapid head motion and blinking performed unnoticeable scene switching that achieved the seamless user experience, especially for the wide-angle turning. Whereas, continuous narrow-angle turning by horizontally rotating the virtual world corresponding to the face orientation achieved enhanced the sense of reality. The proposal comprises a hybrid of these two turning schemes. Experiments using simulator sickness and presence questionnaires revealed that our methods achieved comparable or lower sickness scores and higher presence scores than either of conventional turning schemes.