Out-of-body Locomotion: Vectionless Navigation with a Continuous Avatar Representation

Teleportation is a popular and low risk means of navigating in VR. Because teleportation discontinuously translates the user's viewpoint, no optical flow is generated that could lead to vection-induced VR sickness. However, instant viewpoint translations and resulting discontinuous avatar representation is not only detrimental to presence and spatial awareness but also presents a challenge for gameplay design-particularly for multiplayer games. We compare out-of-body locomotion, a hybrid viewpoint technique that lets users seamlessly switch between a first-person and third-person avatar view, to traditional pointer-based teleportation. While in third-person, if the user doesn't move, the camera remains stationary to avoid any optical flow generation. Third-person also lets users precisely and continuously navigate their avatar without risk of getting VR sick. The viewpoint automatically switches back to first-person as soon the users breaks line of sight with their avatar or the user requests to rejoin the avatar with a button press. A user study compares out-of-body locomotion to teleportation with participants (n=22) traversing an obstacle course. Results show that out-of-body locomotion requires significantly fewer (67%) viewpoint transitions than teleportation while there was no significant difference in performance. In addition to being able to offer a continuous avatar representation, participants also deemed out-of-body locomotion to be faster.