Trigger Walking: A low-fatigue travel technique for immersive virtual reality

We present Trigger Walking, a low-fatigue travel technique for immersive virtual reality which uses hand-held controllers to move about more naturally within a limited physical space. Most commercial applications use some form of teleportation or physical walking for moving around in a virtual space. However, teleportation can be disorienting, due to the sudden change in the environment when teleported to another location. Physical walking techniques are more physically demanding, leading to fatigue. Hence, we explore the use of two spatial controllers that accompany commercial headsets to walk by taking a virtual step each time a controller trigger is pulled. The user has the choice of using the orientation of a single-controller, the average of both controllers, or that of the head to determine the direction of walking, and speed can be controlled by changing the angle of the controller to the Frontal plane.