Automatic cybersickness detection by deep learning of augmented physiological data from off-the-shelf consumer-grade sensors

Cybersickness is still a prominent risk factor potentially affecting the usability of virtual reality applications. Automated real-time detection of cybersickness promises to support a better general understanding of the phenomena and to avoid and counteract its occurrence. It could be used to facilitate application optimization, that is, to systematically link potential causes (technical development and conceptual design decisions) to cybersickness in closed-loop user-centered development cycles. In addition, it could be used to monitor, warn, and hence safeguard users against any onset of cybersickness during a virtual reality exposure, especially in healthcare applications. This article presents a novel real-time-capable cybersickness detection method by deep learning of augmented physiological data. In contrast to related preliminary work, we are exploring a unique combination of mid-immersion ground truth elicitation, an unobtrusive wireless setup, and moderate training performance requirements. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype to compare (combinations of) convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory, and support vector machines with respect to detection performance. We demonstrate that the use of a conditional generative adversarial network-based data augmentation technique increases detection performance significantly and showcase the feasibility of real-time cybersickness detection in a genuine application example. Finally, a comprehensive performance analysis demonstrates that a four-layered bidirectional long short-term memory network with the developed data augmentation delivers superior performance (91.1% F1-score) for real-time cybersickness detection. To encourage replicability and reuse in future cybersickness studies, we released the code and the dataset as publicly available.