Teleporting through virtual environments: Effects of path scale and environment scale on spatial updating

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Virtual Reality
• Spatial Cognition

Background:

• Virtual reality (VR) systems often require navigation in environments larger than the physical space available.
• Teleportation is a common VR locomotion technique, but it typically lacks self-motion cues, potentially impacting spatial updating.
• Understanding how self-motion cues influence navigation in VR is essential for designing intuitive and effective user interfaces.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of rotational self-motion cues on spatial updating during teleportation in virtual environments.
• To determine if the importance of rotational cues varies with the scale of movement and the scale of the virtual environment.
• To investigate how piloting (landmark-based navigation) interacts with self-motion cues.

Main Methods:

• Participants used a teleportation interface in a virtual environment to complete a triangle completion task.
• The study manipulated the presence of rotational self-motion cues, movement scale (triangle size), and environment scale.
• Spatial updating errors were measured by assessing the accuracy of returning to the path origin.

Main Results:

• Rotational self-motion cues significantly reduced overall spatial updating errors across all tested scales.
• The positive impact of rotational cues was amplified in larger movement and environment scales.
• When navigating large paths in small environments, reliance on piloting increased, diminishing but not negating the effect of self-motion cues.

Conclusions:

• Rotational self-motion cues are vital for accurate spatial updating when using teleportation in virtual reality.
• Navigation performance in VR can be enhanced by incorporating rotational self-motion cues and enabling piloting.
• Designers should consider environment and movement scales to optimize the benefits of self-motion cues in VR interfaces.