Moving indoors: a systematic literature review of locomotion in virtual indoor environments

Abstract

ABSTRACT Virtual indoor environments provide a unique combination of indoor cartography, virtual reality, and virtual locomotion. So far however, the indoor aspect of such an environment seems to be neglected even though it may affect how the locomotion of users is conducted as well as how this affects their spatial behaviour. To get an idea about the state of the research, systematic review of peer-reviewed articles mainly from the Scopus database was conducted in this paper. It aims to get a broad idea about the interest in research of virtual locomotion and to figure out what type of research in the indoor environment was conducted. Special interest was put on the types of locomotion techniques, their interaction aspects and research topics. These characteristics were analysed and compared to earlier systematic reviews in this topic. To accommodate the indoor-related themes, environmental aspects (size) and the motivation for using an indoor environment were also obtained from the relevant articles analysed. This way, the paper tries to provide a basis for further research in using indoor environments in virtual reality.