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Eye tracking is becoming increasingly available in head-mounted virtual reality displays with various headsets with integrated eye trackers already commercially available. The applications of eye tracking in virtual reality are highly diversified and span multiple disciplines. As a result, the number of peer-reviewed publications that study eye tracking applications has surged in recent years. We performed a broad review to comprehensively search academic literature databases with the aim of assessing the extent of published research dealing with applications of eye tracking in virtual reality, and highlighting challenges, limitations and areas for future research.

 

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. 

Women are more likely to experience virtual reality (VR) sickness than men, which could pose a major challenge to the mass market success of VR. Because VR sickness often results from a visual-vestibular conflict, an effective strategy to mitigate conflict is to restrict the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion. Sex differences in spatial cognition have been well researched, with several studies reporting that men exhibit better spatial navigation performance in desktop three-dimensional environments than women. However, additional research suggests that this sex difference can be mitigated by providing a larger FOV as this increases the availability of landmarks, which women tend to rely on more than men. Though FOV restriction is already a widely used strategy for VR headsets to minimize VR sickness, it is currently not well understood if it impedes spatial learning in women due to decreased availability of landmarks. Our study (n=28, 14 men and 14 women) found that a dynamic FOV restrictor was equally effective in reducing VR sickness in both sexes, and no sex differences in VR sickness incidence were found. Our study did find a sex difference in spatial learning ability, but an FOV restrictor did not impede spatial learning in either sex. 

Virtual reality sickness typically results from visual-vestibular conflict. Because self-motion from optical flow is driven most strongly by motion at the periphery of the retina, reducing the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion has proven to be an effective strategy to minimize visual vestibular conflict and VR sickness. Current FOV restrictor implementations reduce the user’s FOV by rendering a restrictor whose center is fixed at the center of the head mounted display (HMD), which is effective when the user’s eye gaze is aligned with head gaze. However, during eccentric eye gaze, users may look at the FOV restrictor itself, exposing them to peripheral optical flow which could lead to increased VR sickness. To address these limitations, we develop a foveated FOV restrictor and we explore the effect of dynamically moving the center of the FOV restrictor according to the user’s eye gaze position. We conducted a user study (n=22) where each participant uses a foveated FOV restrictor and a head-fixed FOV restrictor while navigating a virtual environment. We found no statistically significant difference in VR sickness measures or noticeability between both restrictors. However, there was a significant difference in eye gaze behavior, as measured by eye gaze dispersion, with the foveated FOV restrictor allowing participants to have a wider visual scan area compared to the head-fixed FOV restrictor, which confined their eye gaze to the center of the FOV.