Teleportation With Reorientation for Redirected Walking in VR

Redirected walking (RDW) enables users to walk naturally in a virtual environment (VE) that is larger than the physical environment (PE). However, relying entirely on redirected walking to navigate large VEs can be challenging. Teleportation, on the other hand, is a popular locomotion technique in VR as it enables rapid travel over long distances without inducing VR sickness. It is thus a practical approach to combine RDW and teleportation for VR navigation, using RDW for nearby destinations and teleportation for distant targets. This study introduces Teleportation with Reorientation (TRO), a technique that inlays reorientation into teleportation to enhance the performance of redirected walking. TRO applies an orientation offset immediately after teleportation, which users counteract by physically turning in place, thereby creating an opportunity to realign their heading to a favorable direction in the PE. A simulation-based evaluation and a user study were conducted to compare TRO against regular teleportations, all used in conjunction with RDW. The results demonstrated that TRO significantly improved the performance of redirected walking compared to regular teleportation. Regarding the overall navigation experience, even though TRO resulted in a higher workload and lower usability because it uses a perceptible reorientation strategy, most participants still considered TRO to be acceptable. In addition, participants indicated that their likeability and preference ratings for the TRO variant featuring one-step turning were the same as those for regular teleportation. These findings suggest that TRO with one-step turning can function as a viable alternative to regular teleportation for VR navigation when both RDW and teleportation are available.