How Early Can You Tell? Early Eye Gaze Dynamics and Cybersickness Progression in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Cybersickness remains one of the primary barriers to prolonged and comfortable virtual reality (VR) use, yet the temporal development of cybersickness remains poorly understood because its onset and progression vary substantially across individuals. Eye tracking provides a continuous and unobtrusive measure of user behavior, making it well suited for investigating how users respond throughout VR exposure. However, existing work has mainly focused on aggregate gaze measures or post-exposure assessments, leaving the relationship between early eye-movement dynamics and discomfort progression underexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether early eye-movement dynamics characterize the subsequent progression of cybersickness. Using trajectories of fixation duration, fixation dispersion, saccade amplitude, saccade velocity, and gaze eccentricity computed over the first one to five minutes of VR exposure, we evaluate their association with subsequent discomfort progression and compare early gaze dynamics between participants with low and high post-exposure cybersickness severity. Our results show that early fixation dispersion is consistently associated with subsequent discomfort progression, whereas no significant differences are observed between cybersickness severity groups. These findings suggest that early fixation dispersion can characterize the progression of discomfort rather than the final cybersickness severity. Overall, this work provides new insight into the temporal relationship between early eye-movement behavior and cybersickness progression, contributing to the understanding of gaze dynamics during immersive experiences.