Teleport breaks spatial continuity and heading sense
Aliases: teleport disorientation · spatial updating failure · heading loss
What it is
After the jump, people pivot in place hunting for the wall that was in front of them a moment ago. Heading discontinuity is the cut that discrete relocation makes in ongoing spatial updating: at the landing, facing is unknown, and so is which side the just-left object now occupies. This is disorientation in the instant of the jump, not whether the route will be rememberable later.
Comfort can hold at the same time. A quiet stomach with a scrambled head are two different ledgers.
Why it happens
During movement, optic flow, gait, and rotation continuously rewrite a self-centred position vector — spatial updating. Teleport supplies none of that process. Takeoff heading is not path-integrated to the landing; the landing offers only a new visual snapshot. If that snapshot contains no landmark that immediately matches the old heading, facing has to be rebuilt by search.
Heading breaks more easily than position. Position can be re-anchored to nearby objects at the landing; facing is the angle between scene polarity and the nose, and content often yaws the view in the same frame as the translation. The typical landing motor pattern is a body turn then a head sweep, until a remembered surface reappears on the expected side.
Studying it
Use blind pointing or a heading report after a brief scene glance: before and after the jump, ask people to point at the origin, an along-the-way object, or “the direction we came from,” and take angular error. Sketch maps and route recall measure knowledge after repeated travel; they do not answer facing in the landing second.
Manipulate jump distance, whether landing yaw matches takeoff heading, and whether the landing view contains a surface seen before takeoff. Record time to first correct heading, absolute pointing error, and in-place rotation between landing and the first purposeful step.
Asking someone to point at “where that door is now” immediately after landing is harsher than a disorientation questionnaire, which folds sickness and lost heading into one score.
Where it stops holding
When the landing already sits inside the takeoff view and the jump is a step or two, updating barely has to work and the break is faint. A landing with strong polarity — a unique window, a bright exit — can rebuild facing from the scene itself, without path integration. An extra 180° yaw at landing inflates the break into “a different room,” which is no longer just a locomotion effect. Users practised at teleport develop a landing sweep; they look un-lost while they are still substituting search for updating.
Applying it
- Keep landing heading aligned with takeoff heading by default. Do not throw in a yaw as a side effect of the jump.
- Leave at least one pre-takeoff surface or object in the landing view, so there is an immediate matching anchor.
- Give time for a head scan after landing. Do not spawn UI that can only be read facing a particular direction in the same frame.
- How to check: disable previews, teleport someone new to the segment three times, and have them point at the origin with a controller the instant they land. Sustained errors past ninety degrees, or more than a half-turn in place before they start walking, mean heading was cut.