OnShipVR: Reducing Sea-sickness through Virtual Contents with Synchronized and Amplified Actual Ship Rotation

People experience and suffer from motion sickness the most, when riding on ships, among many transportational means. Sea-sickness is often explained by the sensory mismatch theory: the actual motion (particularly roll) of the ship (on which the user is riding) is not coherent with what is seen - the seemingly not-so-turbulent ocean. In addition, unlike riding on ground transportation, people are usually not familiar with the ship motion and rotation. In this poster, we propose to use VR contents, OnShipVr, in which virtual motion in it is synchronized (by a gyro sensor) with that of the ship/user and even exaggerated and vividly visualized, as a way to lower the extent of the sea-sickness, and in addition, as a by-product provide the basis for reducing the VR sickness at the same time so that people can enjoy VR contents on-board. We have field-tested our approach under several different visualization conditions (e.g. point of view and extent of the motion gain) during an actual ship ride and report the informal results.