Here we pro­pose a hybrid inter­face that allows user to seam­less­ly tran­si­tion between a slow ‘con­tin­u­ous’ mode and a fast ‘hyper­jump’ mode. The inter­face aims to main­tain the immer­sion, pres­ence, accu­ra­cy and spa­tial updat­ing of con­tin­u­ous loco­mo­tion while adding the travel effi­cien­cy and min­i­miz­ing the cybersickness.

Continuous loco­mo­tion in VR pro­vides unin­ter­rupt­ed opti­cal flow, which mimics real-world loco­mo­tion and sup­ports path inte­gra­tion . However, opti­cal flow limits the max­i­mum speed and accel­er­a­tion that can be effec­tive­ly used with­out induc­ing cyber­sick­ness. In con­trast, tele­por­ta­tion pro­vides nei­ther opti­cal flow nor accel­er­a­tion cues, and users can jump to any length with­out increas­ing cyber­sick­ness. However, tele­por­ta­tion cannot sup­port con­tin­u­ous spa­tial updat­ing and can increase dis­ori­en­ta­tion. Thus, we designed ‘HyperJump’ in an attempt to merge ben­e­fits from con­tin­u­ous loco­mo­tion and tele­por­ta­tion. HyperJump adds iter­a­tive jumps every half a second on top of the con­tin­u­ous move­ment and was hypoth­e­sized to facil­i­tate faster travel with­out com­pro­mis­ing spa­tial awareness/orientation. In a user study, Participants trav­elled around a nat­u­ral­is­tic vir­tu­al city with and with­out HyperJump (equiv­a­lent max­i­mum speed). They fol­lowed way­points to new land­marks, stopped near them and point­ed back to all pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed land­marks in random order. HyperJump was added to two con­tin­u­ous loco­mo­tion inter­faces (con­troller and lean­ing-based). Participants had better spa­tial awareness/orientation with lean­ing-based inter­faces com­pared to con­troller-based (assessed via rapid point­ing). With HyperJump, par­tic­i­pants trav­elled sig­nif­i­cant­ly faster, while stay­ing on the desired course with­out impair­ing their spa­tial knowl­edge. This pro­vides evi­dence that opti­cal flow can be effec­tive­ly lim­it­ed such that it facil­i­tates faster travel with­out com­pro­mis­ing spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion. In future design iter­a­tions, we plan to uti­lize audio-visual effects to sup­port jump­ing metaphors that help users better antic­i­pate and inter­pret jumps, and use much larger vir­tu­al envi­ron­ments requir­ing faster speeds, where cyber­sick­ness will become increas­ing­ly preva­lent and thus tele­port­ing will become more important.

Publications

Related work

full 3D (flying) HyperJump

For an appli­ca­tion of HyperJump to 3D (flying) loco­mo­tion and in larger scenes, see our HyperJump flying to combat motion sick­ness project web­site.

Discussion & Reframing on Continuous vs. Discontinuous (Teleport) Locomotion in VR