A QoE and simulator sickness evaluation of a smart-exercise-bike virtual reality system via user feedback and physiological signals

In this paper, we proposed, designed, and evaluated a smart-exercise-bike virtual reality system. The proposed system uses a custom microcontroller-based board in order to transmit signals from a stationary exercise bike to a computer, while a commercially available head mounted display is used in order to immerse the users into a virtual reality environment. Various quality settings related to texture resolution and to the frame rate of the rendered environment were evaluated by the users, while simulator sickness was assessed using the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire. Furthermore, physiological responses in terms of electrocardiography and galvanic skin response signals were captured for the whole duration of the experiments in order to better assess the effects of rendering quality and simulator sickness on the quality of experience of the proposed smart-exercise-bike virtual reality system. The effect and correlation between rendering quality and simulator sickness is then discussed in this paper.