Let your fingers do the walking: A unified approach for efficient short-, medium-, and long-distance travel in VR

The tradeoff between speed and precision is one of the challenging problems of travel interfaces. Sometimes users want to travel long distances (e.g., fly) and care less about precise movement, while other times they want to approach nearby objects in a more-precise way (e.g., walk), and care less about how quickly they move. Between these two extremes there are scenarios when both speed and precision become equally important. In real life, we often seamlessly combine these modes. However, most VR systems support a single travel metaphor, which may only be good for one range of travel, but not others. We present a new VR travel framework which supports three separate multi-touch travel techniques, one for each distance range, but that all use the same device. We use a unifying metaphor of the user's fingers becoming their legs for each of the techniques. We are investigating the usability and user acceptance of the fingers-as-legs metaphor, as well as the efficiency and naturalness of switching between the different travel modes. We conducted an experiment focusing on user performance using the three travel modes, and compared our multi-touch, gesture-based approach with a traditional Gamepad travel interface. The results suggest that participants using a Gamepad interface are more time efficient. However, the quality of completing the tasks with the two input devices was similar, while ForcePad user response was faster for switching between travel modes.