FootPorting: Exploring Foot-Based Teleportation Techniques for Seated Users in Confined Spaces

Teleportation is widely used in Virtual Reality (VR) applications, especially for enabling efficient navigation in large-scale virtual environments. Leveraging foot movements for teleportation frees the hands for parallel tasks and helps maintain spatial orientation, making it particularly suitable for seated and multitasking VR scenarios. This work explores feasible foot actions for teleportation in confined seating conditions, such as traveling on an airplane or train, where users' leg motion is feasible, but its range is constrained. Such scenarios are common but are underexplored. We propose seven metaphor-inspired teleportation techniques based on foot interactions and evaluate their effectiveness through a user study. The findings provide valuable insights for designing effective teleportation techniques in VR scenarios where users are seated in constrained spaces.