Multi-Ray Jumping: Comprehensible Group Navigation for Collocated Users in Immersive Virtual Reality
Tim Weißker, Alexander V. Kulik, Bernd Froehlich · 2019
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.