In Touch with Everyday Objects: Teleportation Techniques in Virtual Environments Supporting Tangibility

The application of virtual reality (VR) for everyday use is often limited due to the lack of tactile and kinesthetic feedback. To facilitate and expand the use of VR in daily life, it is possible to employ physical objects readily available at home as tangible objects to provide this missing feedback. For instance, a real chair can allow a user to sit within the virtual environment, even if the sitting place in the virtual world is not a chair. In home-based games, a real but not dangerous stick can provide the holding sensation of a virtual sword. These tracked objects in the real world can serve as a tangibility medium to their virtual counterparts, contributing to a higher sense of presence and immersion. However, such a solution relies on a consistent spatial relationship between the real and virtual space surrounding the user, which makes the basic use of virtual navigation techniques such as teleportation difficult. To allow the navigation on a large virtual environment while supporting a tangible interaction with real objects in a limited physical space at home, this paper explores three different teleportation techniques: to teleport the user, the object, or both of them to a new position accordingly while preserving the user and object’s spatial relationship. All of these approaches enable tangible interaction when using a teleportation technique for navigation, but each one is more or less suitable in different situations of real/virtual spatial consistency.