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


Target specification with Multi-Ray Jumping for two collocated users. While the navigator (blue shirt, right side) specifies a target using the blue parabola, the magenta curve adjusts accordingly to show the offset target location of the passenger (red shirt, left side). The initial direction of the magenta curve is defined by the passenger’s controller.

Abstract

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 naive 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 naive 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.

Our research has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Specific Grant Agreement No. 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2) and from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant 03PSIPT5A (Provenance Analytics). We would like to thank Pauline Bimberg for her support in conducting our user studies, the participants of our studies, and the members of the Virtual Reality and Visualization Research Group at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Publication

Tim Weissker, Alexander Kulik, and Bernd Froehlich. 2019.
Multi-Ray Jumping: Comprehensible Group Navigation for Collocated Users in Immersive Virtual Reality (Nominee for Best Paper Award)
In 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 136-144, Osaka, Japan, 2019. IEEE Computer Society. DOI: 10.1109/VR.2019.8797807
[IEEE][preprint][video]