Comment on: “Role of head-mounted displays in enhancing vestibular rehabilitation effects”
Oskar Rosiak, Magdalena Józefowicz-Korczyńska · Journal of Vestibular Research · 2019
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Miracelli et al. for their interest in our research and we would like to elaborate on the use of Head Mounted Displays (HMD) in vestibular rehabilitation.A key concept in virtual reality is "immersion"a sense of physical "self" in a non-physical, artificial world.Achieving high immersion requires multisensory stimulation.Out of the different stimuli the most important seems to be visual input delivered in high detail, realistic graphics.Application of HMDs to virtual reality experience greatly improves immersion, because it creates a stronger sensory mismatch between the vestibular system and visual input.However, it has been reported that higher detail visual realism in HMDs causes more cybersickness symptoms like headaches, dizziness, nausea and eye stress [1].In time these symptoms alleviate [2, 3], which is most likely caused by vestibular compensation mechanisms and a shift from visual dependence to proprioceptive and vestibular input predominance.It may be hypothesized that more visually dependent patients are prone to cybersickness, but this requires further investigation.The issue of cybersickness in wearable devices for virtual reality is a subject of study, and it has been reported that dynamic focus of the visual field is an important factor in symp-