Mixing Emotions, How Physical Discomfort Influences the Affective Appraisal of Virtual Places

The ambiance in virtual environments is affected by the loss of multimodal information. For many purposes, the affective qualities of a virtual environment require special attention in the modeling process. In order to construct the right ambiance it can be beneficial to engineer the affective appraisal of the virtual environment. However, a userpsilas assessment of the affective qualities of a (virtual) environment is preceded by an internalized appraisal process, which is still relatively unclear. A myriad of factors are known or hypothesized to influence the attributed affective qualities of an environment. We tested if cybersickness, induced by camera movement in the virtual environment, had an effect on the affective appraisal of a virtual cityscape. People experiencing cybersickness rated the environment as less pleasant and more arousing, as compared to people with no symptoms. This implies that the change in affective state that a person experiencing cybersickness undergoes is erroneously attributed to the environment.