PAWS: Personalized Arm and Wrist Movements With Sensitivity Mappings for Controller-Free Locomotion in Virtual Reality

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Virtual Reality (VR) headsets equipped with multiple cameras enable hands-only teleportation techniques without requiring any physical controller. Hands-only teleportation is an effective alternative to controllers for navigation tasks in virtual reality - allowing users to move from one point to another instantaneously. However, the current implementation of hands-only techniques does not consider users’ physical attributes (e.g., arm’s reach). Thus, a hands-only teleportation technique can lead to different user experiences based on physical attributes. We propose PAWS, a personalized arm and wrist-based teleportation technique that incorporates users’ physical attributes for improved teleportation experiences. We first evaluate different degrees of teleportation personalization with no-, partial, and full personalization. We find that full personalization offers faster locomotion – but at the cost of degraded performances with distant targets due to increased sensitivity. We hence further explore different combinations of mapping functions (e.g., sigmoid, quadratic) to personalize motor movements and find that asymmetric functions result in improved performance. Overall, our results show that PAWS helps users to navigate quickly in virtual environments.