Follow Me: Confirmation-based Group Navigation in Collocated Virtual Reality

In collocated social virtual reality, the relative physical and virtual positions of users are often synchronised to reduce audio-visual inconsistencies and the risk of collisions between users. For virtual navigation previous work has proposed group navigation techniques that maintain spatial synchronisation. This, however, limits user autonomy and can be particularly frustrating when some users would prefer to remain at their current virtual position, as can be the case when users have differing goals, interests, or tasks within the virtual environment. In this paper, we introduce a two-phase confirmation-based group navigation concept for collocated scenarios which allows users to stay behind and catch up to the group based on individual confirmation. The confirmation to catch up can be triggered by the group’s guide, the individual user or both. Ghost avatars, which visualise the physical locations of other users, are used to avoid physical collisions in situations where part of the group has already virtually navigated to a new location. We evaluate the three confirmation-based techniques in a user study (N = 24) in the context of a guided tour in a virtual museum and compare it to a baseline group navigation technique. Our findings show that users prefer having the autonomy to decide when to follow their group. Despite increased complexity, the proposed techniques achieved comparable levels of co-presence, spatial orientation, and understanding of others’ positions in both the virtual and physical environments as the baseline, effectively balancing user autonomy, navigation understanding and social experience.