Optimizing Natural Walking Usage in VR using Redirected Teleportation

Virtual Reality (VR) has come a long way since its inception and with the recent advancements in technology, high end VR headsets are now commercially available. Although these headsets offer full motion tracking capabilities, locomotion in VR is yet to be fully solved due to space constraints, potential VR sickness and problems with retaining immersion. Teleportation is the most popular locomotion technique in VR as it allows users to safely navigate beyond the confines of the available positional tracking space without inducing VR sickness. It has been argued that the use of teleportation doesn’t facilitate the use of natural walking input which is considered to have a higher presence because teleportation is faster, requires little physical effort and uses limited available tracking space. When a user walks to the edge of the tracking space, he/she must switch to teleportation. When navigating in the same direction, available walking space does not increase, which forces users to remain stationary and continue using teleportation. We present redirected teleportation, a novel locomotion method that increases tracking space usage and natural walking input by subtle reorientation and repositioning of the user. We first analyzed the positional tendencies of the users as they played popular games implementing teleportation and found the utilization of the tracking space to be limited. We then compared redirected teleportation with regular teleportation using a navigation task in three different environments. Analysis of our data show that although redirected walking takes more time, users used significantly fewer teleports and more natural walking input while using more of the available tracking space. The increase in time is largely due to users walking more, which takes more time than using teleportation. Our results provide evidence that redirected teleportation may be a viable approach to increase the usage of natural walking input while decreasing the dependency on teleportation