Navigation in cross-reality: the effects of VR teleportation visualizations on MR participants in a collaborative setting

Abstract

Effective collaboration across virtual and mixed reality environments depends heavily on how users perceive and understand one another’s actions and movements. In this paper, we evaluate how different teleportation visualization techniques for a virtual reality (VR) user affect the experience of a mixed reality (MR) participant in a multi-user cross-reality collaborative setting. We conduct a user study (N=40) to assess subjective user experience based on questionnaires and short interviews that examine perceived spatial awareness, social presence, and overall quality of experience (QoE). Objective measures include gaze-based metrics, such as fixation distributions and gaze entropy, as well as navigation performance metrics, including task completion time (TCT) and time to fixation (TTF). Together, these subjective and objective data provide a novel understanding of how the examined teleportation visualization techniques influence both perceptual and behavioral aspects of cross-reality collaborative navigation. Findings indicate that teleportation visualizations that convey continuous or constant directional motion cues for the VR user’s avatar (TRAIL, ARROW) lead to higher reported spatial awareness and social presence, more focused and anticipatory gaze behavior, and reduced TTF for MR collaborators, whereas standard instantaneous point and teleport methods tend to fragment visual attention and lower QoE without providing clear benefits.