Evaluation of Visual Feedback Techniques for Mid-Air Teleportation in an Immersive Environment

Target selection-based teleportation is one of the most prevalent locomotion techniques in immersive virtual environments, mitigating visual motion sickness and overcoming physical space constraints. However, the conventional Point & Teleport method, widely implemented in commercial VR systems, restricts navigation to planar surfaces, limiting exploration of mid-air positions essential for tasks such as obtaining elevated viewpoints or bypassing obstacles. Mid-air teleportation extends the Point & Teleport metaphor to support free navigation in three-dimensional space, yet the influence of visual feedback on its performance and usability remains underexplored. This paper investigates six different implementations of visual feedback techniques during target specification in mid-air teleportation. We evaluated these techniques through a user study with 56 participants. The results reveal trade-offs between the downward-facing camera, which achieves the highest accuracy, and other visual feedback techniques that rely on occlusion cues, such as the spherical pointer, the spherical boundary, the ground reference cylinder, and the avatar, which result in lower task completion time. We propose initial design guidelines for target selection-based mid-air teleportation based on our findings.