Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Rogelio Legaspi, Journalist, AOPG

One of the many wonders of Virtual Reality (VR) technology is the immersion it can give to users, taking them to various places and events without being there physically. With different VR devices such as headsets, people are able to engage themselves in many scenarios, such as in video games and simulations.

However, being in a virtual world can be polarising, as you interact with digital objects often for a long time. In fact, side effects are apparent with people using VR devices since they are staring at a bright screen, inducing motion sickness and baffling their sense of balance.

VR applications are promising and it is important to mitigate such problems to fully leverage the technology. Researchers from Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) are able to consider this challenge, analysing the symptoms of motion sickness that users may experience in VR content and developing a technology to reduce VR sickness using AI.

With its ‘VR Human Factor-based VR sickness analysis and monitoring tool’, ETRI developed an AI-driven technology for correlating VR devices’ elements and sickness associated with it by obtaining experimental data from more than 500 users and applying machine-learning.

This research has taken into account a larger scale of experiential data since it is difficult to analyse the quantitative correlation between the factors causing VR sickness for different users. Meaning, ETRI had to collect data from the individual characteristics of users and process this using AI.

The technology developed by ETRI is a learning engine software that used bio-signals from users and predicts VR sickness with Artificial Intelligence. Quite simply, it is a technology that analyses the types of VR sickness experienced by each individual through biomarker pattern detection.

As for reducing the effects of such sickness, ETRI has also developed a ‘VR sickness reduction content authoring tool’, which enables the real-time adjustment of VR elements during the content production process.

This tool can objectively adjust the content, ranging from level 1 to 5 based on quantitative indicators, featuring intuitive and real-time editing of sickness-causing factors. In addition, ETRI developed the ‘VR human factor-based motion data editing tool’ that can analyse and reduce VR sickness on a rider-type VR device, also called a motion simulation platform.

It automatically adjusts or edits content while interpreting the difference in the amount of information between VR images and user actions, reducing motion sickness on the fly. It will be primarily applied to interactive ride-on toys and used for VR sickness and safety analysis.

ETRI believes that these technologies can help with the development of VR. “We will try to promote the commercialisation of VR technology in various fields such as high-level job training, mental illness treatment, medical simulation, etc. using the world’s first developed VR sickness analysis and prediction technology,” said Dr Wookho Son of ETRI’s CG/Vision Lab.

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