Understanding the Cybersickness Effects of Using Virtual Reality-Based Classroom for Undergraduate Students: A Preliminary Study

Purpose – Virtual reality (VR) technologies have expanded their domain of
application towards education, offering various pedagogical advantages such as
an immersive environment, teaching innovation, and in-depth user engagement
by allowing the students to experience real-life scenarios of the taught subject
through virtual simulations. Motion sickness, as one of the long-standing key
challenges of VR utilization, even in gaming, often becomes a barrier for VR
users to fully engage with the content developed in the virtual world. Thus, this
work presents a preliminary study on understanding the symptoms of motion
sickness — which will be referred to later as ‘cybersickness’ — in the teaching
and learning (T&L) context.
Design/methodology/approach – A VR-based virtual classroom (V-Room)
was developed and tested, in which 60 undergraduate students at the University
of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) participated. In this study, the students
were equipped with the same VR headset and had the same V-Room
environment. Data were collected through a two-step questionnaire, using both
qualitative and quantitative measures, that was distributed to the participants
before and after the study session. The severity of cybersickness was
categorized into low-impact, medium-impact, and high-impact symptoms,
alongside an overall comfort level experienced in the V-Room. Using the
ANOVA F-test statistical approach, the data were analysed based on the
following two research questions: (1) Has gender an influence on the presence
of cybersickness symptoms?; and (ii) Does students’ academic background (i.e.
natural sciences and social science) also affect their experience in using VR for
learning?
Findings – The results demonstrated that approximately 47% of the participants
had experienced cybersickness during the V-Room experiential journey, of
whom 64% were females. With a confidence level of 95% (α=5%), the p-value
obtained for the respective gender and study discipline categories against the
cybersickness symptoms were all smaller than 0.05, indicating that there was a
significant difference between the two compared variables. Likewise, the Fstatistical value was larger than the F-critical value, showing that both gender
and study discipline have a considerable impact on the cybersickness. Moreover,
it is worth highlighting that the top three factors that caused the cybersickness
were the speed of the virtual movement, the perspective angle, and the visual
properties of the virtual environment.
Originality/value/implications – It is hoped that the results of this study
provide valuable pointers for future VR-based virtual classroom developers to
minimize the cybersickness symptoms in the higher education T&L context that
would enable an effective learning environment for the students.