Anticipatory Audio Architecture for VR Cybersickness Mitigation in Serious Games Using MetaSounds

Cybersickness remains a major barrier to virtual reality adoption in serious games, yet audio-based mitigation is underexplored compared with visual interventions. This pa per presents an anticipatory audio architecture that predicts upcoming motion events and generates procedural sound cues before the visual motion occurs, implemented with MetaSounds in Unreal Engine 5. The design is motivated by predictive coding accounts of motion sickness, in which advance auditory information about impending motion may help the brain form more accurate sensory predictions. Technical evaluation on a single representative maritime scene shows motion-to-audio latency below 15 milliseconds with modest computational overhead. We report an exploratory cross-sectional study with 105 participants. Because all participants experienced the same anticipatory-audio configuration and no control condition was included, the study cannot establish the causal efficacy of anticipatory audio; it tests associations, not effects. Participants who perceived higher audio quality reported less motion sickness; the association was carried mainly by perceived audio–visual synchronization, survived demographic adjustment, and attenuated to marginal significance once session duration and cognitive load were controlled. Physiological measures corroborated the sickness self-report rather than the intervention. We conclude with design guidelines labelled as empirically supported or engineering-derived and outline the controlled comparison needed to establish efficacy.