Switch Techniques to Recover Spatial Consistency Between Virtual and Real World for Navigation with Teleportation

International audienceIn many virtual reality systems, user physical workspace is superposed with a particular area in a virtual environment. The spatial consistency between the real and virtual interactive space allows users to take advantage of physical workspace to walk and to interact intuitively with the real and virtual contents. To maintain such spatial consistency, application designers usually deactivate user virtual navigation capability. This limits user reachable virtual area, and segments the spatial consistency required sub-task from a continuous scenario mixing large scale navigation. In order to provide users with a continuous virtual experience, we introduce two switch techniques to help users to recover the spatial consistency in some predefined virtual areas with teleportation navigation: simple switch and improved switch. We conducted a user study with a box-opening task in a CAVE-like system to evaluate the performance and usability of these techniques under different conditions. The results highlight that assisting the user on switching back to a spatially consistent situation ensures entire workspace accessibility and decreases time and cognitive effort used to complete the sub-task. The simple switch results in less task completion time, less cognitive load, and is globally preferred by users. With additional visual feedback of user switch destination, the improved switch seems to provide the user with a better understanding of the resulting spatial configuration of the switch