Demonstrating the Need for Application-Level Design Guidelines in In-Vehicle Augmented Reality to Alleviate Motion Sickness: A Field Study

Abstract

With fully autonomous vehicles on the horizon, promising new opportunities emerge for productivity during travel. However, motion sickness remains a significant barrier. This study investigates whether video-passthrough (VPT) augmented reality (AR) can reduce motion sickness when working in a moving vehicle. Specifically, we compare the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) Head-Mounted Display (HMD) with a traditional tablet device to assess and compare their impact on motion sickness. The investigation is split into two parts: (1) a main field-study with 40 participants performing visual tasks with both AVP and tablet while traveling in a vehicle and (2) a control-study to evaluate the impact of the device's technical specifications on motion sickness response. Our results indicate that motion sickness occurred less frequently with the AVP compared to the tablet, though the difference was not statistically significant. Severe nausea was exclusively reported during AVP use, though only by a small number of highly susceptible participants who had previously experienced symptoms with the tablet. Our findings also suggest that technological factors such as display resolution, image clarity and Photon-to-Photon (P2P) latency of the AVP at most lead to minor discomfort or mild nausea in highly susceptible individuals and do not trigger moderate or severe motion sickness. The results discussed in this work emphasize the need for design guidelines and standards to ensure in-vehicle AR applications are accessible without inducing motion sickness.

Keywords: Motion Sickness, Augmented Reality, Working While Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006906