There are a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent VR loco­mo­tion inter­faces out there, all with their own pros and cons. In fact, far too many to all inves­ti­gate in one behav­ioural study — so let’s ask diverse VR experts for their opinion…

Interested in sup­port­ing research on VR loco­mo­tion inter­faces and help­ing the VR com­mu­nity better under­stand the pros and cons of dif­fer­ent inter­faces? We cre­ated a survey to do just that (open until May 10^th):

Do you have 20-40min for a chance to win up to $200 CAD? Do you have at least 2 years of VR expe­ri­ence and used VR at least 20 times? Then fill out our research survey: https://ca.research.net/r/vrlocomotion. (You don’t have to live in Canada — as long as you have a PayPal account you can enter the raffle. There will be more than a dozen cash prices, rang­ing from $10, 50, 100 to 200).

Below is a video of the dif­fer­ent VR loco­mo­tion inter­faces inves­ti­gated in this survey (yes, we know there are many more, but we had to limit the number some­what else the survey would take too long…). In the survey, you will be asked to judge dif­fer­ent loco­mo­tion inter­faces, rang­ing from walk­ing (free-space, redi­rected, tread­mill, and walk­ing in place) and other cycli­cal motions (finger walk­ing in place and arm swing­ing); fol­lowed by steer­ing meth­ods such as leaning-based (stand­ing and sit­ting) and “joy­sticks” (both reg­u­lar hand-held joy­stick, foot joy­stick, and dash); other con­tin­u­ous loco­mo­tion meth­ods includ­ing mouse/keyboard and wand/pointing-based; and tele­por­ta­tion as a dis­con­tin­u­ous method.

If you’d like to know more about VR loco­mo­tion inter­faces (after com­plet­ing the survey, we don’t want to bias you), please check out our VR Locomotion Interfaces course and our 3D user inter­faces course or our other projects.

Publications

The below paper includes first data from our loco­mo­tion survey (but not yet the full data set)