Head-Mounted Augmented Reality for Car Sickness Mitigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing methods for mitigating motion sickness in vehicle passengers, particularly rear-seat occupants, are limited in effectiveness and practicality, as they often fail to seamlessly integrate the occupant's natural vision with the vehicle's movement, and are intrusive or require active gaze towards displays.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that uses a head-mounted display (HMD) to stream real-time external environmental images aligned with the passenger's head movements, incorporating a head-tracking system and environmental imaging, to maintain visual coherence and reduce sensory conflicts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If liquid-filled glasses are used to provide horizontal visual reference, then motion sickness mitigation is improved, but passenger comfort deteriorates due to intrusiveness
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an HMD device as an intermediary between the passenger's natural vision and the vehicle's movement. The HMD captures real-time external environmental images and streams them to the passenger, serving as a mediator that provides visual reference without physical intrusion. This resolves the contradiction by replacing the intrusive liquid-filled glasses with a digital intermediary that achieves the same motion reference function while maintaining comfort.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a visual copy of the external environment through the HMD camera and displays it to the passenger. This optical copy provides the necessary visual reference for motion perception without requiring physical contact with the passenger's eyes or vision path. The copied visual information aligns with vestibular inputs to reduce motion sickness while avoiding the intrusiveness of physical barriers.
2Reliability
If in-vehicle display systems are used to present vehicle-related visual content, then motion sickness mitigation is improved, but ease of use deteriorates because passengers must actively look towards displays
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of requiring the passenger to actively look at a display (traditional approach), the system inverts the interaction by bringing the display to the passenger's natural field of view. The HMD device streams images directly to the passenger's eyes without requiring active engagement or deviation of gaze. This inversion resolves the contradiction by making the system adaptive to the passenger's natural behavior rather than requiring behavioral change.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adapts the visual content to the passenger's head movements and gaze direction. The HMD tracks head movements and adjusts the streamed images accordingly, ensuring the visual reference remains coherent with the passenger's natural viewing behavior. This dynamic adaptation eliminates the need for active engagement while maintaining motion sickness mitigation effectiveness.
3Reliability
If existing display systems are used, then some motion sickness mitigation is achieved, but adaptability deteriorates because they fail to integrate occupant's natural vision with vehicle movement
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements feedback by tracking the passenger's head movements and using this information to adjust the visual content streamed to the HMD. The head-tracking system continuously monitors the passenger's natural vision direction and feeds this information back to the image streaming system, which then adapts the visual reference accordingly. This closed-loop feedback mechanism resolves the contradiction by enabling dynamic integration between the occupant's natural vision and the vehicle's movement.
Solution Approach 2:
The HMD device serves multiple functions: it captures external environmental images, tracks head movements, streams visual content, and adapts the display to maintain coherence with natural vision. This multi-functionality enables the system to integrate various aspects of the passenger's experience (visual, vestibular, head movement) into a unified motion sickness mitigation solution, achieving high adaptability while maintaining effectiveness.
Data Source
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AI summary
The invention relates to a method for reducing or suppressing motion sickness in a vehicle passenger, the method comprising: obtaining (1001, 2001, 3002) real-time external environmental images of the vehicle (200); tracking (1002, 2002, 3004) head movements of a passenger of the vehicle; and streaming (1004, 2004, 3003) the real-time external environmental images to a head-mounted display device (100) worn by the passenger, wherein the streaming is adaptively aligned (1003, 2003, 3005) with the tracked head movements to maintain visual coherence with a perspective of the passenger The invention further relates to a corresponding augmented reality display system and to a corresponding non transitory storage medium.