Rearranging users into a new formation is a key component of successful group navigation techniques. However, the question of how users should be distributed within the new formation to create an intuitive transition that minimizes disruptions of ongoing social activities is currently not explored. In this paper, we begin to close this gap by introducing four user placement strategies based on mathematical considerations, discussing their benefits and drawbacks, and sketching further novel ideas to approach this topic from different angles in future work.
Replicating traditional auditorium layouts for attending talks in social virtual reality often results in poor visibility of the presentation and a reduced feeling of being there together with others. Motivated by the use case of academic conferences, we present two orthogonal enhancements for virtual auditoriums to overcome these limitations and report on their positive effects as observed in an initial user study with groups.
We review the different facets, the resulting challenges, and previous implementations of group navigation techniques in the literature and derive four broad and non-exclusive topic areas for future research on the subject. Our overarching goal is to underline the importance of optimizing navigation processes for groups and to increase the awareness of group navigation techniques as a relevant solution approach in this regard.
We illustrate the inherent challenges of applying the SSQ in virtual reality research and highlight large differences that can be found in related work. Based on our observations, we conclude by providing suggestions on how to improve the expressiveness of SSQ results in future studies and encourage researchers to consider simpler measurement methods if their research questions allow.
We present the collaborative Virtual Reality Neurorobotics Lab, which allows multiple collocated and remote users to experience, discuss and participate in neurorobotic experiments in immersive virtual reality.
This thesis describes navigation by jumping, a range-restricted variant of teleportation commonly implemented in modern VR applications. It illustrates the design space of jumping techniques and evaluates them with respect to spatial orientation performance and simulator sickness. The results indicate that jumping is a viable alternative to steering.