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1. Does teleporting length affect spatial awareness?

   Yao, Q.; Zhao, Y; Creem-Regehr, S. H.; Stefanucci, J. K.; Bodenheimer, B. (September 2023, ISMAR-Adjunct workshop on Perception, Cognition, Comfort and User Safety)

   Teleporting, or jumping, is a common method of moving through virtual environments. It provides a simple user interface, but deprives users of self-motion cues that are important to acquiring spatial knowledge. This paper examines one parameter of the teleportation interface, the teleportation or jump distance, and how that may affect spatial knowledge acquisition. We report the results of an experiment that examined the effects of two different, but fixed teleportation distances on how users could acquire knowledge of landmarks and routes. The results suggest that the teleport distance does not matter, hence teleportation as an interface is robust. However, use of teleportation resulted in significantly increased simulator sickness, a surprising result. 

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2. Individual differences in teleporting through virtual environments: A latent profile analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW50115.2020.00213  

   Cherep, Lucia A.; Lim, Alex F.; Kelly, Jonathan W.; Miller, Anthony; Gilbert, Stephen B. (March 2020, Individual differences in teleporting through virtual environments: A latent profile analysis)

   Teleportation in virtual reality (VR) affords the ability to explore beyond the physical space. Previous work has demonstrated that this interface comes at a spatial cognitive cost – though, upon closer inspection, not everyone appears similarly affected. A latent profile analysis identified three groups that significantly differed on spatial updating performance and follow-up analyses showed significant differences in objective measures of spatial ability (e.g., mental rotation and perspective-taking). These results suggest that there are individual differences in domains of spatial cognition that are related to how well a user may keep track of his or her location while teleporting in VR. 

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3. Analysis of Positional Tracking Space Usage when using Teleportation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00122  

   Prithul, Aniruddha; Folmer, Eelke (March 2021, 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW))

   null (Ed.)

   Teleportation is a widely used virtual locomotion technique that allows users to navigate beyond the confines of available tracking space with a low possibility of inducing VR sickness. Because teleportation requires little physical effort and lets users traverse large distances instantly, a risk is that over time users might only use teleportation and abandon walking input. This paper provides insight into this risk by presenting results from a study that analyzes tracking space usage of three popular commercially available VR games that rely on teleportation. Our study confirms that positional tracking usage is limited by the use of teleportation. 

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4. Teleportation in Virtual Reality; A Mini-Review

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.730792  

   Prithul, Aniruddha; Adhanom, Isayas Berhe; Folmer, Eelke (October 2021, Frontiers in Virtual Reality)

   Teleportation is a widely implemented virtual locomotion technique that allows users to navigate beyond the confines of available tracking space with a low possibility of inducing virtual reality (VR) sickness. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of prior research on teleportation. We report results from user studies that have evaluated teleportation in comparison to other locomotion methods and survey improved versions of teleportation. We identify a number of areas for future research. 

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5. Exploration of Large Omnidirectional Images in Immersive Environments

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2019.8797777  

   Mirhosseini, Seyedkoosha; Ghahremani, Parmida; Ojar, Sushant; Marino, Joseph; Kaufrnan, Arie (March 2019, 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR))

   Abstract: Navigation is a major challenge in exploring data within immersive environments, especially of large omnidirectional spherical images. We propose a method of auto-scaling to allow users to navigate using teleportation within the safe boundary of their physical environment with different levels of focus. Our method combines physical navigation with virtual teleportation. We also propose a “peek then warp” behavior when using a zoom lens and evaluate our system in conjunction with different teleportation transitions, including a proposed transition for exploration of omnidirectional and 360-degree panoramic imagery, termed Envelop, wherein the destination view expands out from the zoom lens to completely envelop the user. In this work, we focus on visualizing and navigating large omnidirectional or panoramic images with application to GIS visualization as an inside-out omnidirectional image of the earth. We conducted two user studies to evaluate our techniques over a search and comparison task. Our results illustrate the advantages of our techniques for navigation and exploration of omnidirectional images in an immersive environment. 

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