Spatial Updating and Simulator Sickness During Steering and Jumping in Immersive Virtual Environments

Many recent head-mounted display applications and games implement a range-restricted variant of teleportation for exploring virtual environments. This travel metaphor referred to as jumping only allows to teleport to locations in the currently visible part of the scene. In this paper, we present a formal description and classification scheme for teleportation techniques and its application to the classification of jumping. Furthermore, we present the results of a user study (N=24) that compared jumping to the more conventional steering with respect to spatial updating and simulator sickness. Our results show that despite significantly faster travel times during jumping, a majority of participants (75%) achieved similar spatial updating accuracies in both conditions (mean difference 0.02°, =5.05°. In addition, jumping induced significantly less simulator sickness, which altogether justifies it as an alternative to steering for the exploration of immersive virtual environments. However, application developers should be aware that spatial updating during jumping may be impaired for individuals.