Research Trends in Virtual Reality Locomotion Techniques

Virtual reality (VR) researchers have had a long-standing interest in studying locomotion for developing new techniques, improving upon prior ones, and analyzing their effects on users. To help organize prior work, several researchers have presented taxonomies for categorizing locomotion techniques in general. More recently, researchers have begun to conduct systematic reviews to better understand what locomotion techniques have been investigated. In this paper, we present our own systematic review of locomotion techniques based on a well-established taxonomy, and we use k-means clustering to identify to what extent locomotion techniques have been explored. Our results indicate that selection-based, walking-based, and steering-based locomotion techniques have been moderately to highly explored while manipulation-based and automated locomotion techniques have been less explored. We also present results on what types of metrics have been used to evaluate locomotion techniques. While usability, discomfort, and travel performance metrics have been moderately to highly explored, other metrics, such as biometrics, user experience, and emotions, have been less explored.