WriArm: Leveraging Wrist Movement to Design Wrist+Arm Based Teleportation in VR
Sohan Chowdhury, Ashraf Ullah, Nathan Bruce Pelmore, Pourang Irani, Khalad Hasan
Abstract
Teleportation, a widely used locomotion technique in Virtual Reality (VR), is used to move users through a virtual environment. Until recently, handheld controllers have been used for teleportation, where users use controllers to point to a location and perform an action (e.g., button press) to be instantly moved to the targeted location. Recent advancements in VR hand tracking enable users to move through and interact with the virtual world without controllers. This opens the opportunity for compelling alternatives to explore hand tracking-based teleportation techniques for more natural, intuitive and immersive interactions. Prior work mostly explores using arm movement for teleportation as an alternative to using the controller. In this paper, we design and evaluate WriArm, a VR locomotion technique that leverages both wrist and arm movement for VR teleportation. We first conduct a design study to find suitable hand gesture sets that can be mapped to teleportation activities such as activation, pointing, confirmation and cancellation for WriArm and arm-based techniques. Based on the results, we conduct a study comparing users’ performance while navigating tasks with the two techniques and three gesture sets. Results show that WriArm improves navigation efficiency by allowing users to navigate the environment quickly. We conclude with design guidelines for arm and wrist-based teleportation in VR.