Substituting Teleportation Visualization for Collaborative Virtual Environments

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) offers a boundless space for users to create, express, and explore in the absence of the limitation of the physical world. Teleportation is a locomotion technique in a virtual environment that overcomes our spatial constraint and a common approach for travel in VR applications. However, in a multi-user virtual environment, teleportation causes spatial discontinuity of user's location in space. This may cause confusion and difficulty in tracking one's collaborator who keeps disappearing and reappearing around the environment. To reduce the impact of such issue, we have identified the requirements for designing the substituted visualization (SV) and present four SVs of the collaborator during the process of teleportation, which includes hover, jump, fade, and portal.