Effects of Posture and Locomotion Methods on Postural Stability, Cybersickness, and Presence in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) users experience unwanted symptoms, such as body imbalance, nausea, dizzi-ness, and loss of presence. This study aims to investigate the effects of posture and locomotionon postural stability, cybersickness, and presence in VR environments. Twenty participants playeda VR game under different conditions depending on posture (standing and sitting) and locomo-tion methods (joystick and teleportation), and seven dependent variables (COM, AP displacement,ML displacement, ASL, PSQ, VRSQ, and SOP) were analyzed to observe postural stability, cybersick-ness, and presence. The results revealed that postural instability increased when the task was per-formed in the standing posture with the joystick locomotion method compared to otherconditions. The AP displacement, ML displacement, and ASL were lower under teleportation condi-tions. The PSQ scores indicated that postural stability was better in the sitting posture than in thestanding posture. The VRSQ score revealed that the sitting with teleportation condition had lesscybersickness than the other conditions. The SOP score was the highest in the standing posturewith the teleportation condition. This study concludes that a sitting posture with teleportationlocomotion can be considered when designing games in which users actively interact with virtualmovements.