Big Frog Vibes: Jumping Superhuman Distances Forward, Vertically and Sideways in VR Using Comfortably High Translational Gain

Jumping is an engaging physical activity bounded by individual physical capabilities. However in Virtual Reality (VR) we can apply perceptual manipulations like translational gain to real jumps, amplifying the user's apparent capabilities - jumping higher and further than is possible in reality. Prior work has focused on imperceptible gains, but this greatly limits the range of available experiences users can engage in, and designers can create. Research outside of jumping has shown that higher, clearly noticeable gains can still be comfortable, engaging and usable in VR. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate ($\mathrm{N}=18$) the maximal comfortable gain applied to three jump types: forward, vertical, and sideways. We found, for the majority of participants, high gains ($>100 \mathrm{x}$) are not only comfortable but made users feel enhanced whilst retaining jump ownership, deriving guidelines on the extent to which we can amplify real jumps to feel superhuman in virtuality.