Eyes on teleporting: comparing locomotion techniques in Virtual Reality with respect to presence, sickness and spatial orientation

This work compares three locomotion techniques for an immersive VR environment: two different types of teleporting (with and without animation) and a manual (joystick-based) technique. We tested the effect of these techniques on visual motion sickness, spatial awareness, presence, subjective pleasantness, and perceived difficulty of operating the navigation. We collected eye tracking and head and body orientation data to investigate the relationships between motion, vection, and sickness. Our study confirms some results already discussed in the literature regarding the reduced invasiveness and the high usability of instant teleport while increasing the evidence against the hypothesis of reduced spatial awareness induced by this technique. We reinforce the evidence about the issues of extending teleporting with animation. Furthermore, we offer some new evidence of a benefit to the user experience of the manual technique and the correlation of the sickness felt in this condition with head movements. The findings of this study contribute to the ongoing debate on the development of guidelines on navigation interfaces in specific VR environments.