Multi-Ray Jumping: Comprehensible Group Navigation for Collocated Users in Immersive Virtual Reality

The collaborative exploration of virtual environments benefits from joint group navigation capabilities. In this paper, we focus on the design and evaluation of a short-range teleportation technique (jumping) for a group of collocated users wearing head-mounted displays. In a pilot study with expert users, we tested three naïve group jumping approaches and derived the requirements for comprehensible group jumping. We propose a novel Multi-Ray Jumping technique to meet these requirements and report results of two formal user studies, one exploring the effects of passive jumping on simulator sickness symptoms (N=20) and a second one investigating the advantages of our novel technique compared to naïve group jumping (N=22). The results indicate that Multi-Ray Jumping decreases spatial confusion for passengers, increases planning accuracy for navigators, and reduces cognitive load for both.