Elden VR: Reducing Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality Melee Combat

Fast-paced action games rely on high-motion avatar actions such as dodge rolls, knockdowns, and high-speed locomotion. In VR, presenting these actions from a first-person viewpoint can induce motion sickness when the camera moves in ways the user’s body does not. Prior out-of-body and hybrid-perspective VR research shows that decoupling the viewpoint from the avatar can reduce discomfort, but focus on locomotion or isolated actions. To bring research closer to real-life application, we contribute a hybrid first-/third-person VR viewpoint control method for melee combat, a complex use case involving locomotion, dodge rolls, and stagger/knockdown reactions. We display high-motion actions in third person while keeping the user’s head-tracked viewpoint stable, and teleport the viewpoint before and/or after the action. We evaluated the system in two experiments. Experiment 1 was an exploratory qualitative evaluation (N=27). Experiment 2 was a quantitative within-subjects comparison of motion sickness with respect to a first-person baseline (N=20). The results suggest that our approach successfully reduces motion sickness and appears suitable for short actions such as dodge rolls and staggers, while longer locomotion sequences may introduce trade-offs around embodiment and agency. Overall, our work offers a novel design reference for using hybrid perspectives in high-motion VR gameplay.