FootEyePorting: Design and Evaluation of Foot-Eye Teleportation Techniques in Virtual Reality

Various locomotion techniques, such as teleportation, walking in place, redirected walking, and walking, have been proposed. However, conventional methods overlooked the human ability to coordinate multiple modalities (e.g., eyes and feet) for natural virtual locomotion within a small physical space. Inspired by the natural coordination of the eyes and feet in human walking, as well as insights from prior work, this study investigates how eye-foot coordination can be leveraged more effectively for VR teleportation. We present four novel teleportation techniques based on eye-foot coordination, using users' gaze behavior and 3D foot positions as input modalities. A user study with 20 participants compared our techniques with a state-of-the-art foot-based locomotion method. Results demonstrate the superiority of our approaches: task completion times were significantly reduced, NASA-TLX workload scores and SUS usability scores were markedly improved, and participants expressed a clear preference for our techniques over the baseline. These findings provide a strong foundation for the design and implementation of future eye-foot coordinated teleportation methods in VR.