A VR Sickness Reduction Method Using Visual Guide Transparency

As VR hardware advances, hardware-related factors inducing motion sickness are expected to be gradually resolved; consequently, software-based mitigation methods are garnering significant attention. While various software-based methods exist, they often rely on modifying the content itself, presenting a significant drawback: difficulty in immediate application to existing content. Meanwhile, the Visual Guide (VG) technique reduces sickness by superimposing a separate image onto the content. This approach offers the distinct advantage of being easily applicable to existing content. However, motion sickness mitigation via visual guides suffers from a drawback: the added imagery can distract from the content, thereby reducing user concentration. To address this, this paper proposes a mitigation method utilizing the transparency of the visual guide to minimize the loss of focus on the content. To evaluate the proposed method, experiments were conducted to collect EEG data, Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) scores, and responses to a custom-designed concentration questionnaire. Under the tested conditions, the 60-s fade-out condition showed a favorable descriptive balance between lower mean SSQ score changes and preserved concentration. Because corrected pairwise post-hoc comparisons were not performed and the EEG analysis was based on whole-session average power spectral density, these findings should be interpreted as condition-level trends rather than definitive pairwise or event-related effects.