Comparing Teleportation Methods for Travel in Everyday Virtual Reality

The number of everyday virtual reality (VR) applications is increasing at a remarkable pace. Perhaps the most fundamental interaction in these applications is the ability to travel throughout virtual environments in which users find themselves immersed. Teleportation is often used to support travel in VR applications. While many methods exist for implementing teleportation, relatively little research has been done to compare such methods. In this paper, we describe an experiment to compare four teleportation methods for travel in everyday virtual reality. We found that, for general use, experienced VR users prefer to control a virtual arc with their hand to indicate the location and direction of orientation to which they want to teleport. However, teleporting a single step at a time in the direction of view may support more natural movement and encourage shorter travel paths, but at the expense of longer travel times.