Virtual Locomotion: A Survey

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 26; no. 6; pp. 2315 - 2334
• Main Authors: Al Zayer, Majed, MacNeilage, Paul, Folmer, Eelke
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.06.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Legged locomotion; Locomotion; Monitoring; Navigation; Space exploration; survey; Task analysis; Taxonomy; Three-dimensional displays; virtual locomotion; virtual navigation; Virtual reality; Visualization
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2887379

Virtual reality (VR) has enjoyed significant popularity in recent years. Where navigation has been a fundamental appeal of 3D applications for decades, facilitating this in VR has been quite a challenge. Over the past decades, various virtual locomotion techniques (VLTs) have been developed that aim to offer natural, usable and efficient ways of navigating VR without inducing VR sickness. Several studies of these techniques have been conducted in order to evaluate their performance in various study conditions and virtual contexts. Taxonomies have also been proposed to either place similar techniques in meaningful categories or decompose them to their underlying design components. In this survey, we aim to aggregate and understand the current state of the art of VR locomotion research and discuss the design implications of VLTs in terms of strengths, weaknesses and applicability.