Multisensory Brain and Cognition (MBC) lab researchers Michael Barnett-Cowan, Séamas Weech, and Sophie Kenny went to the Society for Neuroscience 2018 conference that took place in San Diego, November 3-7, 2018.
Sophie Kenny, alum of the Games Institute and MBC lab, presented a poster on the effect of narrative on presence and cybersickness in Virtual Reality (VR). The poster reported the findings from a study she co-authored with Seamas Weech and Michael-Barnett Cowan.
Kenny, Weech, and Barnett-Cowan's study looked at how providing participants with narrative context affected their subsequent experiences in a VR simulation.
Specifically, we examine whether a top-down intervention based on enriched narrative context can increase the personal relevance and believability of the VR environment, protecting against cybersickness that arises from multisensory conflict.
Participants were either given minimal or enriched narrative context. The researchers found that enriched narrative significantly reduced sickness for participants who self-reported as "non-gamers" and played fewer than 5 hours of games per week.
Read more about the study here: https://ativsoftware.com/appinfo.php?page=Session&project=SFN18&server=eventpilot.us&id=P41413
Séamas Weech delivered a talk during the SfN symposium on changes in time perception caused by an adaptation procedure in virtual reality. Weech discussed a study he co-authored with Ambika Bansal, Sophie Kenny, and Michael-Barnett Cowan in which they ran participants through a VR experience and then assessed their subsequent performance during motor and non-motor tasks.
They manipulated whether or not coupling participant movements to speeds they experienced in the VR space affected later performance:
The results revealed specific effects of the time-flow manipulation on participants' performance in a motor time perception task. These findings provide valuable insights into the potential impacts of virtual reality on time perception, which is of timely interest given the impending growth of the virtual reality user-base.
Read more about the study here: https://ativsoftware.com/appinfo.php?page=Session&project=SFN18&server=eventpilot.us&id=P38712