Spherical World in Miniature: Exploring the Tiny Planets Metaphor for Discrete Locomotion in Virtual Reality

We explore the concept of a Spherical World in Miniature (SWIM) for discrete locomotion in Virtual Reality (VR). A SWIM wraps a planar WIM around a physically embodied sphere and thereby implements the metaphor of a tangible Tiny Planet that can be rotated and moved, enabling scrolling, scaling, and avatar teleportation. The scaling factor is set according to the sphere's distance from the head-mounted display (HMD), while rotation moves the current viewing window. Teleportation is triggered with a dwell time when looking at the sphere and keeping it still. In a lab study (N=20), we compare our SWIM implementation to a planar WIM with an established VR controller technique using physical buttons. We test both concepts in a navigation task and also investigate the effects of two different screen sizes. Our results show that the SWIM, despite its less direct geometrical transformation, performed superior in most evaluations. It outperformed the planar WIM not only in terms of task completion time (TCT) and accuracy but also in subjective ratings.