Design and evaluation of a continuous interface for real-time self-reporting of VR sickness: ACM CHI 2026 Poster

Exploring new methods for users to report VR sickness symptoms continuously and without breaking the immersion in VR.

Overview

Precise measurements of sickness symptoms induced during a virtual reality (VR) experience are essential for evaluating VR systems and developing designs oriented toward usability, safety and user acceptance. However, VR sickness assessment typically relies either on discrete self-report questionnaires (which lack temporal resolution, interrupt the experience, thus reducing immersion, and provide coarse snapshots of symptom evolution) or on objective signals obtained with biosensors, which typically require extensive post-processing and interpretation. To address these shortcomings, we propose a continuous interface for real-time self-reporting of VR sickness, designed following a human-centered methodology. We design and evaluate three interface prototypes that allow users to report symptom intensity while remaining fully immersed in the virtual scene. Our findings demonstrate that users significantly prefer the continuous nature of our interfaces over the discrete Likert Scales of traditional questionnaires, identifying them as a more intuitive and less cognitively demanding alternative. In addition, the study allows us to identify the most suitable design according to user-centered criteria. Our contribution is an empirically evaluated continuous interface for real-time VR sickness assessment.

Video Presentation

The Poster

Poster presented at ACM CHI 2026: https://chi2026.acm.org/

Resources

• Download Extended Abstract (PDF) Note: CHI 2026 had an acceptance rate of 38.4% (2,068 submissions).