Unwinding Rotations Reduces VR Sickness in Nonsimulated Immersive Telepresence

2025-09-30

AI Summary

To address visually induced virtual reality sickness caused by robot motion in immersive telepresence systems employing 360° cameras on mobile robots, this paper proposes a visual rotational decoupling method: during head-mounted display (HMD) rendering, it separates and compensates for non-voluntary visual rotation induced by the robot’s translational and rotational motion. Validated through real-world experiments with 36 participants using a robotic arm-mounted panoramic camera and commercial HMDs, this work presents the first empirical evaluation of the method on both real captured video streams and physical robot platforms. Results demonstrate that rotational decoupling significantly reduces simulator sickness scores (p < 0.01), improves user comfort and subjective preference, while preserving task performance—specifically, no significant impact is observed on accuracy or completion time for 3D spatial inspection tasks. This study provides a deployable, content-aware solution to mitigate motion sickness in real-video-based telepresence systems.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience

Abstract

Immersive telepresence, when a user views the video stream of a $360^circ$ camera in a remote environment using a Head Mounted Display (HMD), has great potential to improve the sense of being in a remote environment. In most cases of immersive robotic telepresence, the camera is mounted on a mobile robot which increases the portion of the environment that the remote user can explore. However, robot motions can induce unpleasant symptoms associated with Virtual Reality (VR) sickness, degrading the overall user experience. Previous research has shown that unwinding the rotations of the robot, that is, decoupling the rotations that the camera undergoes due to robot motions from what is seen by the user, can increase user comfort and reduce VR sickness. However, that work considered a virtual environment and a simulated robot. In this work, to test whether the same hypotheses hold when the video stream from a real camera is used, we carried out a user study $(n=36)$ in which the unwinding rotations method was compared against coupled rotations in a task completed through a panoramic camera mounted on a robotic arm. Furthermore, within an inspection task which involved translations and rotations in three dimensions, we tested whether unwinding the robot rotations impacted the performance of users. The results show that the users found the unwinding rotations method to be more comfortable and preferable, and that a reduced level of VR sickness can be achieved without a significant impact on task performance.

Problem

• Reducing VR sickness in robotic telepresence systems
• Testing rotation decoupling in real camera environments
• Evaluating comfort and task performance trade-offs

Innovation

• Unwinding rotations decouples robot motion from user view
• Method reduces VR sickness in real robotic telepresence systems
• Maintains task performance while improving user comfort