illumotion: An Optical-illusion-based VR Locomotion Technique for Long-Distance 3D Movement
Authors: Sin, Zackary PT, Jia, Ye, Li, Richard Chen, Leong, Hong Va, Li, Qing, Ng, Peter HF
Published in: 2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) (2024)
illumotion is a locomotion technique based on optical manipulation. The user can use (a) zooming, (b) dragging and (c) pulling/pushing to move around a scene with 3D movement. As an optically-driven method, it tunes the speed based on the target; (ai) targets further away will lead to faster movement and vice versa, (aii) for closer targets.
Abstract
Locomotion has a marked impact on user experience in VR, but currently, common to-go techniques such as steering and teleportation have their limitations. Particularly, steering is prone to cybersickness, while teleportation trades presence for mitigating cybersickness. Inspired by how we manipulate a picture on a mobile phone, we propose illumotion, an optical-illusion-based method that, we believe, can provide an alternative to these two typical techniques. Instead of zooming in a picture by pinching two fingers, we can move forward by "zooming" toward part of the 3D virtual scene with pinched hands. Not only is the proposed technique easy to use, it also seems to minimize cybersickness to some degree. illumotion relies on the manipulation of optics; as such, it requires solving motion parameters in screen space and a model of how we perceive depth. To evaluate it, a comprehensive user study with 66 users was conducted. Results show that, compared with either teleportation, steering or both, illumotion has better performance, presence, usability, user experience and cybersickness alleviation. We believe the result is a clear indication that our novel opticallydriven method is a promising candidate for generalized locomotion.
