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Eye tracking is becoming increasingly available in head-mounted virtual reality displays with various headsets with integrated eye trackers already commercially available. The applications of eye tracking in virtual reality are highly diversified and span multiple disciplines. As a result, the number of peer-reviewed publications that study eye tracking applications has surged in recent years. We performed a broad review to comprehensively search academic literature databases with the aim of assessing the extent of published research dealing with applications of eye tracking in virtual reality, and highlighting challenges, limitations and areas for future research.

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Teleportation is a widely implemented virtual locomotion technique that allows users to navigate beyond the confines of available tracking space with a low possibility of inducing virtual reality (VR) sickness. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of prior research on teleportation. We report results from user studies that have evaluated teleportation in comparison to other locomotion methods and survey improved versions of teleportation. We identify a number of areas for future research.

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Women are more likely to experience virtual reality (VR) sickness than men, which could pose a major challenge to the mass market success of VR. Because VR sickness often results from a visual-vestibular conflict, an effective strategy to mitigate conflict is to restrict the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion. Sex differences in spatial cognition have been well researched, with several studies reporting that men exhibit better spatial navigation performance in desktop three-dimensional environments than women. However, additional research suggests that this sex difference can be mitigated by providing a larger FOV as this increases the availability of landmarks, which women tend to rely on more than men. Though FOV restriction is already a widely used strategy for VR headsets to minimize VR sickness, it is currently not well understood if it impedes spatial learning in women due to decreased availability of landmarks. Our study (n=28, 14 men and 14 women) found that a dynamic FOV restrictor was equally effective in reducing VR sickness in both sexes, and no sex differences in VR sickness incidence were found. Our study did find a sex difference in spatial learning ability, but an FOV restrictor did not impede spatial learning in either sex.

VR sickness is a major concern for many users as VR continues its expansion towards widespread everyday use. VR sickness is thought to arise, at least in part, due to the user’s intolerance of conflict between the visually simulated self-motion and actual physical movement. Many mitigation strategies involve consistently modifying the visual stimulus to reduce its impact on the user, but this individualized approach can have drawbacks in terms of complexity of implementation and non-uniformity of user experience. This study presents a novel alternative approach that involves training the user to better tolerate the adverse stimulus by tapping into natural adaptive perceptual mechanisms. In this study, we recruited users with limited VR experience that reported susceptibility to VR sickness. Baseline sickness was measured as participants navigated a rich and naturalistic visual environment. Then, on successive days, participants were exposed to optic flow in a more abstract visual environment, and strength of the optic flow was successively increased by increasing the visual contrast of the scene, because strength of optic flow and the resulting vection are thought to be major causes of VR sickness. Sickness measures decreased on successive days, indicating that adaptation was successful. On the final day, participants were again exposed to the rich and naturalistic visual environment, and the adaptation was maintained, demonstrating that it is possible for adaptation to transfer from more abstract to richer and more naturalistic environments. These results demonstrate that gradual adaptation to increasing optic flow strength in well-controlled, abstract environments allows users to gradually reduce their susceptibility to sickness, thereby increasing VR accessibility for those prone to sickness.