You Make Me Sick! The Effect of Stairs on Presence, Cybersickness, and Perception of Embodied Conversational Agents

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are used in a diverse range of applications. Many of these involve an embodied conversational agent (ECA), a virtual human who exchanges information with the user. Unfortunately, VR technologies remain inaccessible to many users due to the phenomenon of cybersickness: a collection of negative symptoms such as nausea and headache that can appear when immersed in a simulation. Many factors are believed to affect a user's level of cybersickness, but little is known regarding how these factors may influence a user's opinion of an ECA. In this study, we examined the effects of virtual stairs, a factor associated with increased levels of cybersickness. We recruited 39 participants to complete a simulated airport experience. This involved a simple navigation task followed by a brief conversation with a virtual airport customs agent in Spanish. Participants completed the experience twice, once walking across flat hallways, and once traversing a series of staircases. We collected self-reported ratings of cybersickness, presence, and perception of the ECA. We additionally collected physiological data on heart rate and galvanic skin response. Results indicate that the virtual staircases increased user level's of cybersickness and reduced their perceived realism of the ECA, but increased levels of presence.