Locomotion

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Locomotion are ways to move through the virtual worlds of VR.

Methods

Teleportation

No need to call it anything fancy. This method of locomotion is pretty simple and obvious. Look or point in the direction you want to go and click a button to warp. Screen fades to black if you are more concerned with keeping players from getting sick than you are with frustrating them with slow navigation!

Pros: Intuitive, understandable, simple.

Cons: Exhausting, confusing in move from point A-B puzzle games.

Omnidirectional elevator

Get this, its an elevator that can go in All directions! Not just up or down, this thing goes wherever you want, but don't rotate it around or players will get terribly sick.

Pros: Fun, simple, not exhausting

Cons: Picky people will claim it makes them feel sick. Players are locked to their elevator.

Cockpit

Hope your game calls for it, having a cockpit around the player can help prevent simulator sickness bu only if its a driving factor in terms of core mechanics. Having a frame, rollcage or cockpit helps most people feel as though they have a stable environment within which they are riding in and traveling around with.

Pros:

Cons: only applicable in certain situations such as Mech games.

Astral body

First person when you need to interact with the environment. Third person when you need to run around in the environment. Similar to a out of body experience, your camera gets pulled out to third person when you need to navigate but you may fly back into your body when you need to interact or socialize.

Pros: Easy to navigate and interact, clean

Cons: Immersion breaking for some

Pull

Pulling the environment around you with your hands.

Pros: Makes you feel a bit like superman.

Cons: Feels super awkward, does not work well in multiplayer.

Real world space

For standing / room scale VR only. Users move in real world spaces. This limits the distance of users' movement because the tracked / available spaces are often quite small. It can be used in conjunction with teleportation to extend the movable space.

Pros: Very realistic and immersive

Cons: Cannot function with large movements, only works in small spaces, spaces have to be designed for physical movement

Blink

Blink demonstration and explanation

Created by Cloudhead Games, Blink is a innovative locomotion method originally developed by The Gallery. Designed to eliminate simulator sickness and operate in various play space sizes, Blink builds upon the teleportation method. Blink is divided into 3 types of movements: Cinematic Blink, Precision Blink and Volume Blink. Cinematic Blink allows players to look at a location then press a button on the controller to travel there. Precision Blink allows players to display a marker at their destination. Players can use the marker to teleport to a specific location. Volume Blink adds to the previous 2 systems. It uses a marker and a square / circular border that shows not only the destination but also the amount of space players can walk around in after teleporting.

  • Blink is designed for a standing playing experience.

Pros: Reduce simulator sickness, allows for the scaling of play space sizes

Cons:

Cloudstep

Cloudstep demonstration

Created by IrisVR and VR Bits, Cloudstep is a zero vection, first person locomotion method originally developed for Technolust. Using the analog stick from a gamepad, players will move in that direction in discreet steps, similar to miniature teleportations. This method removes all vection, hence eliminating simulator sickness with first person locomotion. Vection is the enemy of VR. As Amity explains in the clip below, when your see the world move around you and you don't feel the Gs, your brain thinks you're poisoned.

  • Cloudstep is designed for a sitting playing experience.
Cloudstep explanation

Cloudstep also gives the game a very cool feel. Sort of like an oldschool dungeon crawler. Cloudstep is toggleable. We found that people don’t really care about how they get from one place to another in VR, as long as it doesn’t make them sick doing so. With the CV1’s 360 tracking, its very comfortable to move around with Cloudstep whilst standing, rotate with your body and explore the area you are presently in to it’s fullest by walking a few steps around, crouching and leaning.

Pros: Reduces simulator sickness and improve player comfort

Cons:

Tunneling

This experimental technique which I call Tunneling (because of its similarity to "tunnel vision") is an attempt to marry the strengths of both continuous and instantaneous locomotion. The idea is to confine controller induced vection to only a small central region of the view. This little face-locked viewport ("tunnel") displays continuous motion and allows the user to steer the player just like they normally would in an FPS-style game. Meanwhile, the peripheral view remains at the point of origin, so there is no controller-induced vection in the periphery. This allows the user to feel grounded and motionless while simultaneously steering the player with the first-person viewport. After the movement is complete, the periphery automatically snaps to the new player position, but the snap feels seamless because there is no disruption in the forward view. It simply expands to fully engulf the user.

So how does it feel? Not too bad in my opinion. The visuals can be slightly confusing if you are not prepared for it or if you pay attention to the periphery. But when you become engaged in the center view, the sides fade away from your attention - just as the "tunnel-vision" namesake suggests, and controlling the character feels as natural as any FPS. Once you stop to get your bearings, the periphery snaps to your location affording you a fully immersive view exactly when you need it. It's a pretty good compromise, or as one of my colleagues put it ... "hey you know, this doesn't completely suck." Which is about all you can hope for when dealing with the intractable problem of VR locomotion.

  • The technique is scalable. You can increase or decrease the size of the tunnel view to increase or decrease vection - although in practice once the view gets too small it's a bit unusable for navigation.
  • There is a potentially big rendering penalty. In the naive implementation you have to render two completely different views and composite them. However the lower FOV of the center view makes it less costly to render. Low resolution rendering of the periphery is an obvious optimization that should be considered. For an extreme optimization it might be possible to render the periphery monoscopically or simply as a cube map - although those techniques have potential downside in terms of incorrect parallax.

Problems and Solutions

Sitting

Standing

Room-scale

Locomotion in virtual reality presents many problems and many opportunities to innovate. Aside from traditional input devices like mouse, keyboard and gamepad, the most obvious method of locomotion is simply walking around within the range of the positional tracking devices. One problem presented by "walking" is the available space of the room. Physical obstacles such as walls and objects will prevent the user from advancing. One solution to this problem is a omni-directional treadmill such as Omni. Another option is to use teleportation or elevators to virtually transport the user to a new environment while keeping the physical space the same.

Input Devices

3DRudder, Cyberith Virtualizer, KAT WALK, Omnideck, VRGO, VirZoom, Virtuix Omni

References