Reducing Disorientation in Teleportation: Improving Navigation in Virtual Reality

Physically walking and turning within a virtual environment (VE) is the most natural way to navigate in virtual reality (VR), although the VE often exceeds the physical limitations of the tracked space. As a result, teleportation, in which the user is immediately transported to a selected location, is a common navigation interface that allows users to explore large VEs. An additional benefit of teleportation is that users tend to experience less cybersickness since visual motion is typically absent (Akiduki et al., 2003). One drawback of teleportation is the tendency to disorient users, as the lack of self-motion cues may result in the loss of spatial awareness. The objective of the current study is to investigate ways to improve the use of teleportation within VR in order to decrease the effect of disorientation. The current study will collect data from users participating in partially concordant and discordant navigation tasks to determine whether taking the perspective of an avatar mitigates the effects of disorientation in teleportation. The results of this study may inform developers of ways to improve teleportation interfaces for use in advanced spatial training and VR gaming experiences. This project was completed with contributions from Jonathan Kelly, Stephen Gilbert, Lucia Cherep, and Alec Ostrander from Iowa State University.