Exploring Pointing and Confirmation Techniques for Teleportation Across Varying Elevations in Virtual Reality

Teleportation in Virtual Reality (VR) is a locomotion technique that allows users to navigate between locations within a virtual environment instantly. Traditionally, VR teleportation is performed using physical controllers, where users control a teleportation pointer — represented by a straight line or parabola — and activate the teleportation to the target destination by pressing a button. Recent advances in hand and eye-tracking capabilities in Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) enable designers to leverage hand and eye-based interactions to enhance the immersion and naturalness of controller-free VR usage. However, there has been limited research on comparing different controller-free methods for VR teleportation across various elevations. To address this gap, we conducted a user study exploring three controller-free pointing techniques (gaze, hand, and head), four confirmation modalities (finger pinch, eye-blink, dwell, and voice), and two types of teleportation pointers (linear and parabolic) for VR teleportation across various elevations. Our results show that head-based pointing was faster and more accurate than other techniques, with head and gaze achieving higher throughput than hand-based methods. For confirmation, finger pinch yielded the best performance in terms of task completion time and throughput, followed by dwell, voice, and eye-blink; dwell was the most accurate. The linear pointer outperformed the parabolic pointer in some contexts. Based on these findings, we propose design guidelines to enhance controller-free VR teleportation using various input modalities.