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.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/hgf6p/.
Notes
A constant value of 0.4 was added to all error values prior to log transformation (Ekwaru and Veugelers 2018), as this minimized skewness.
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number CHS-1816029.
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Kelly, J.W., Powell, N., Hoover, M. et al. Teleporting through virtual environments: benefits of navigational feedback and practice. Virtual Reality 27, 1315–1326 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-022-00737-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-022-00737-0