HyperJumping in Virtual Vancouver: Combating Motion Sickness by Merging Teleporting and Continuous VR Locomotion in an Embodied Hands-Free VR Flying Paradigm

Motion sick­ness, unin­tu­itive nav­i­ga­tion, and lim­ited agency are crit­i­cal issues in VR/XR imped­ing wide-spread adop­tion and enjoy­able user expe­ri­ences. To tackle these chal­lenges, we present HyperJump, a novel VR inter­face merg­ing advan­tages of con­tin­u­ous loco­mo­tion and teleportation/dashing into one seam­less, hands-free, and easily learn­able inter­face for flying and ground-based locomotion.

Users step onto a vir­tual hov­er­board and simply lean (or move their head) in the direc­tion they’d like to fly in a highly nat­u­ral­is­tic Virtual Vancouver 3D model, free­ing up hands for other inter­ac­tions. When vir­tual speeds reach levels likely to induce motion sick­ness, HyperJump adds inter­mit­tent jumps (tele­port­ing every second, synched to the music beat) instead of accel­er­at­ing fur­ther. The fur­ther you lean the fur­ther you jump, with­out increas­ing con­tin­u­ous travel speed (optic flow) or motion sick­ness. This allows for easy-to-learn and hands-free pre­cise loco­mo­tion across small– to large-scale envi­ron­ments (ground-based and flying), with­out having to switch inter­faces or move­ment metaphor, or increas­ing risk of motion sickness.

HyperJump will be exhib­ited at the 2022 Siggraph con­fer­ence in Vancouver, BC, Canada in case you’d like to try it out! [patent pend­ing]. the 3D Virtual Vancouver model was pro­vided by GeoSim Cities inc.

We are cur­rently work­ing on making HyperJump avail­able — stay tuned.

For our ear­lier work on HyperJump for ground-based loco­mo­tion and how it affects spa­tial orientation/updating, see our project web­site on Integrating Continuous and Teleporting VR Locomotion into a Seamless “HyperJump” Paradigm.

Project video & images

1-minute teaser video

Full project video for Siggraph 2022

Publications & Exhibits on HyperJump Flying

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532834.3536211

Patent details

Media Coverage on HyperJump Flying

below are a few selected media cov­er­ages on this project and poten­tial applications

Impressions from our HyperJump booth at the Siggraph 2022 Immersive Pavillion

Publications on HyperJump Ground-based Locomotion

Related work

Ground-based HyperJump locomotion

For our ear­lier work on HyperJump for ground-based loco­mo­tion and how it affects spa­tial orientation/updating, see our project web­site on Integrating Continuous and Teleporting VR Locomotion into a Seamless “HyperJump” Paradigm.

Discussion & Reframing on Continuous vs. Discontinuous (Teleport) Locomotion in VR

Short on time? here’s a 2-minute brief ver­sion of this talk