Effects of Transfer Functions and Body Parts on Body-centric Locomotion in Virtual Reality

Body-centric locomotion allows users to control both movement speed and direction with body parts (e.g., head tilt, arm swing or torso lean) to navigate in virtual reality (VR). However, there is little research to systematically investigate the effects of body parts for speed and direction control on virtual locomotion by taking in account different transfer functions(L: linear function, P: power function, and CL: piecewise function with constant and linear function). Therefore, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the combinational effects of the three factors (body parts for direction control, body parts for speed control, and transfer functions) on virtual locomotion. Results showed that (1) the head outperformed the torso for movement direction control in task completion time and environmental collisions; (2) Arm-based speed control led to shorter traveled distances than both head and knee. Head-based speed control had fewer environmental collisions than knee; (3) Body-centric locomotion with CL function was faster but less accurate than both L and P functions. Task time significantly decreased from P, L to CL functions, while traveled distance and overshoot significantly increased from P, L to CL functions. L function was rated with the highest score of USE-S, -pragmatic and -hedonic; (4) Transfer function had a significant main effect on motion sickness: the participants felt more headache and nausea when performing locomotion with CL function. Our results provide implications for body-centric locomotion design in VR applications.