Evaluating Automatic Parameter Control Methods for Locomotion in Multiscale Virtual Environments

Virtual environments with a wide range of scales are becoming commonplace in Virtual Reality applications. Methods to control locomotion parameters can help users explore such environments more easily. For multi-scale virtual environments, point-and-teleport locomotion with a well-designed distance control method can enable mid-air teleportation, which makes it competitive to flying interfaces. Yet, automatic distance control for point-and-teleport has not been studied in such environments. We present a new method to automatically control the distance for point-and-teleport. In our first user study, we used a solar system environment to compare three methods: automatic distance control for point-and-teleport, manual distance control for point-and-teleport, and automatic speed control for flying. Results showed that automatic control significantly reduces overshoot compared with manual control for point-and-teleport, but the discontinuous nature of teleportation made users prefer flying with automatic speed control. We conducted a second study to compare automatic-speed-controlled flying and two versions of our teleportation method with automatic distance control, one incorporating optical flow cues. We found that point-and-teleport with optical flow cues and automatic distance control was more accurate than flying with automatic speed control, and both were equally preferred to point-and-teleport without the cues.