How Video Game Locomotion Methods Affect Navigation in Virtual Environments

Navigation, or the means by which people find their way in an environment, depends on the ability to combine information from multiple sources so that properties of an environment, such as the location of a goal, can be estimated. An important source of information for navigation are spatial cues generated by self-motion. Navigation based solely on body-based cues generated by self-motion is called path integration. In virtual reality and video games, many locomotion systems, that is, methods that move users through a virtual environment, can often distort or deprive users of important self-motion cues. There has been much study of this issue, and in this paper, we extend that study in novel directions by assessing the effect of four game-like locomotion interfaces on navigation performance using path integration. The salient features of our locomotion interfaces are that two are primarily continuous, i.e., more like a joystick, and two are primarily discrete, i.e., more like teleportation. Our main findings are that the perspective of path integration, people are able to use all methods, although continuous methods outperform discrete methods.