Relationship between age, postural balance and cybersickness during repeated exposure to virtual reality
Résumé
Sensory-motor interfaces such as Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) induce sensory conflicts between visual, somatosensory, and vestibular information while standing (Weech, Varghese & Barnett-Cowan, 2018; Litleskare, 2021). With age, there are changes linked to the deterioration of sensory receptors and processing of sensory information (Lord, Delbaere & Sturnieks, 2018). Therefore, this study focuses on the management of sensory conflicts with advancing age, particularly on the postural and cybersickness changes during repeated exposure to a visual perturbation induced in virtual reality. We repetitively exposed 75 participants (age 21 to 86) wearing HMD and upright on a force plate to 5 repetitions of the same displacements in the VR environment. We measured after a cybersickness score (Kennedy et al., 1993) and the center of pressure displacement. The cybersickness studied after the fifth exposure is significantly higher than after the first exposure. Nevertheless, cybersickness isn’t correlated with aging. There is a postural adaptation (decreasing oscillations) with repeated exposure, not correlated to age, even if advancing age induces greater postural oscillations in the antero-posterior axis. Indeed, a similar adaptation seems to occur regardless of age. First exposure postural oscillations are not correlated to cybersickness while 5th exposure oscillations are negatively correlated. May cybersickness induce postural stiffening to decrease sensory stimulations to limit conflicts?
