Reorienting with the Bare Hand: Gesture-Based Techniques for Orientation-Enabled Teleportation in Virtual Reality

Teleportation is a widely adopted locomotion technique in virtual reality (VR), with reorientation commonly integrated into commercial systems to reduce physical turning and improve navigational control. However, research on reorientation-enabled teleportation has received limited attention and still lacks clear design guidance, resulting in longer interaction times, greater complexity, and higher mental workload. To bridge this gap, we revisit reorientation-enabled teleportation through bare-hand interaction, a natural and device-free modality that is now increasingly supported and widely adopted in mainstream VR systems. Accordingly, four gesture-based techniques, Concurrent Wrist Rotation (C-WR), Decoupled Wrist Rotation (D-WR), Joystick Wrist Rotation (J-WR), and Direction Drawing (DD), were introduced and evaluated in a controlled user study with 24 participants. Results show that C-WR was fastest but error-prone, D-WR improved accuracy at the cost of time, J-WR supported precise orientation but was demanding and slow, while DD offered balanced performance and was most preferred overall. From these findings, four design implications were distilled, emphasizing efficiency, intuitive mappings, and support for diverse user preferences. Finally, two example extensions illustrate how these techniques may extend to broader VR applications.