Spatial Awareness and User Preferences During Group Locomotion in Virtual Reality: A Study with Four-User Groups

Recent work investigated Group Locomotion Techniques (GLTs), which enable the viewpoint of several users to be updated simultaneously with pairs of users and simulated agents. We present a user study with four-user teams in which we compared two different GLTs during a search task in a large virtual environment (VE). Parabola-Based Group Jump allows one to select the future position with a parabola-based ray cast, and the World-in-Miniature (WiM) Group Teleport enables instant teleportation on a miniature model view of the VE. Participants were asked to find and assemble objects scattered in the VE while remembering its spatial configuration, with a subsequent task to reproduce it on paper individually and as a group. Our results show that spatial awareness increased over time, with both GLTs resulting in comparable scores, but group scores were better than individual ones. In addition, we saw an indication that the position of the individual user in the VE can influence their spatial awareness. Users preferred both GLTs to be available for navigation, although they predominantly used WiM Group Teleport.