Try This for Size: Multi-Scale Teleportation in Immersive Virtual Reality.

Area of Science:

• Virtual Reality
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Usability Studies

Background:

• Virtual environments (VEs) offer immersive experiences.
• Multi-scale navigation in VEs is crucial for detailed inspection and broad overviews.
• Existing steering-based interfaces for scale adjustment can cause cybersickness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate novel teleportation-based techniques for multi-scale navigation in VEs.
• To reduce cybersickness by avoiding continuous motion flow.
• To compare different methods of specifying scale adjustments in conjunction with teleportation.

Main Methods:

• Developed three novel teleportation-based techniques for virtual reality (VR) multi-scale travel.
• Investigated specifying scale adjustments simultaneously with, connected after, or separately from horizontal position changes.
• Conducted a two-part user study with 30 participants to assess usability and comfort.

Main Results:

• Simultaneous and connected scale specification methods were found suitable for effective and comfortable multi-scale teleportation.
• These methods offer nuanced individual benefits for VR navigation.
• Separate scale specification was perceived as less beneficial by users.

Conclusions:

• Teleportation-based scale adjustment in VR can mitigate cybersickness compared to steering-based methods.
• Simultaneous and connected interaction paradigms are promising for intuitive and comfortable multi-scale VR experiences.
• Further research and replication are encouraged with the provided study executable.