Teleporting through virtual environments: benefits of navigational feedback and practice

Abstract

Virtual environments (VEs) can be infinitely large, but movement of the virtual reality (VR) user is constrained by the surrounding real environment. Teleporting has become a popular locomotion interface to allow complete exploration of the VE. To teleport, the user selects the intended position (and sometimes orientation) before being instantly transported to that location. However, locomotion interfaces such as teleporting can cause disorientation. This experiment explored whether practice and feedback when using the teleporting interface can reduce disorientation. VR headset owners participated remotely. On each trial of a triangle completion task the participant traveled along two path legs through a VE before attempting to point to the path origin. Travel was completed with one of two teleporting interfaces that differed in the availability of rotational self-motion cues. Participants in the feedback condition received feedback about their pointing accuracy. For both teleporting interfaces tested, feedback caused significant improvement in pointing performance, and practice alone caused only marginal improvement. These results suggest that disorientation in VR can be reduced through feedback-based training.

Field of view restriction and snap turning as cybersickness mitigation tools

“…Finally, the conclusion that multiple cybersickness mitigation tools do not combine to further reduce cybersickness may not generalize beyond the two mitigation tools used here. Examples of other approaches to mitigating cybersickness (many of which are implemented in GingerVR [15]) include rest frames that provide a stable visual reference frame [45], [46], [47], [48], teleportation when translating (i.e., changing position) [25], [29], [49], [50], visual dots that move in the opposite direction to cancel out visual motion [51], foveated depth-of-field blur [52], and foveated rendering [53]. Future research should examine whether the current findings extend to other cybersickness mitigation tools that are easily or commonly paired.…”