Teleport avoids visual–vestibular conflict
Aliases: point-and-teleport · discrete locomotion · blink teleport
What it is
A parabolic pointer, a release, and the user is already at the landing — no sliding ground in between. Teleport locomotion makes translation a discrete jump: the retina never receives sustained translational optic flow, so the vestibular organs are not cross-examined by a visual claim that “you are accelerating.” What it buys is comfort, not heading.
The difference from walking the same route is not whether the destination is reachable. It is whether the trip includes a stretch of fake self-motion in the optic array. While that stretch is present, the conflict channel stays open.
Why it happens
The dominant conflict is visual self-motion against otoliths and canals that report stillness. Smooth sliding paints ground texture across the peripheral retina while the body sits or stands. Teleport deletes that temporal window: both frames around the cut are static scenes, vision has no sustained self-motion to report, and the vestibular system is not asked to lie along with it.
The cut is not free — pose changes abruptly, and facing may not match. That is a spatial-updating problem. For the conflict channel, the load-bearing fact is the absence of sustained visual self-motion. Implement the jump as a dashed lunge with motion smear, and optic flow returns at a higher rate for a short burst; the comfort advantage is given back.
Studying it
The usual contrast is discrete teleport versus smooth translation on the same tour. Sample discomfort with the nausea subscale of the SSQ or with spoken FMS (Fast Motion Sickness Scale) during the session; a single post-session total misses the peak, which tends to land while motion is happening.
Compare locomotion type (discrete jump / smooth translation), whether the jump includes a fade or a dash smear, and whether the user initiates each move. Watch FMS peaks, dropout, and voluntary pauses taken to avoid sickness. Pointing error and sketch maps measure spatial knowledge, which is not the conflict question this leaf answers.
Lab “teleports” often include a few hundred milliseconds of fade; consumer titles mostly hard-cut. Fades inject brief optic flow. Treat the two as different stimulus levels.
Where it stops holding
The comfort advantage is largest when seated, or when the tracking volume is too small to walk. When virtual translation already equals physical walking, the conflict is not there to buy out. Users highly adapted to smooth locomotion shrink the between-condition gap. A dash, a slide-into-place, or a camera that flies at the landing turns the discrete jump back into continuous motion and the claim no longer applies. On 3DoF hardware the rotational optic-flow conflict remains; teleport only removes the translational slice.
Applying it
- Make point-and-teleport the default for long-range travel. Do not ship stick-sliding as the only, un-disableable scheme.
- Keep the jump a static cut. If a transition is required, use a very short black frame, not forward smear.
- Let the user initiate every jump. A ride-along teleport also removes the buffer of “I decided to move.”
- How to check: run the same ~eight-minute tour once with teleport and once with smooth motion; collect spoken FMS on a fixed interval. A clearly higher peak or a drop in completion under smooth motion is what makes the comfort claim real.