The Relationship Between Time and Distance Perception in Egocentric and Discrete Virtual Locomotion (Teleportation)

TL;DR

The paper investigates whether introducing time into discrete teleportation in VR can mitigate distance underestimation. Through a prestudy and two experiments comparing instant, walking-speed, faster-walking-speed, and continuous-target teleportation, the authors show that a proportional delay significantly reduces distance underestimation from roughly 27% to about 16.9%, with Bias improving while other metrics remain unchanged. however, effects on room-size perception are inconclusive, and counting strategies or environmental cues continue to influence judgments. The work establishes time as a novel factor in VR distance perception and provides ecologically grounded parameter choices (walking speed ≈ 1.95 m/s; fade duration ≈ 0.30 s) to inform future interface design and research.

Abstract

Traveling distances in the real world inherently involves time, as moving to a desired location is a continuous process. This temporal component plays a role when estimating the distance covered. However, in virtual environments, this relationship is often changed or absent. Common teleportation techniques enable instantaneous transitions, lacking any temporal element that might aid in distance perception. Since distances are found to be commonly underestimated in virtual environments, we investigate the influence of time on this misperception, specifically in target-selection-based teleportation interfaces. Our first experiment explores how introducing a delay proportional to the distance covered by teleportation affects participants' perception of distances, focusing on underestimation, accuracy, and precision. Participants are required to teleport along a predefined path with varying delays. A second experiment is designed to determine whether this effect manifests in a more application-specific scenario. The results indicate a significant reduction in distance underestimation, improving from 27% to 16.8% with a delayed teleportation method. Other sub-scales of distance estimation hardly differ. Despite targeted adaptations of previous study designs, participants have again found strategies supporting them in estimating distances. We conclude that time is a factor affecting distance perception and should be considered alongside other factors identified in the literature.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Virtual environment of the distance estimation and distance repetition task with a capsule representing the users' movement on the path when using the delayed teleportation methods.
• Figure 2: Individual components of the teleportation process for all interfaces used in our experiments.
• Figure 3: Mean Absolute Normalized Error (Accuracy) for all teleportation methods for the distance estimation and repetition task.
• Figure 6: Virtual environment of the size estimation task. Exemplary view into room combination 1.
• Figure 7: Room combinations used with sizes $81~m^2$(Room 1), $30~m^2$(Room 2), $44~m^2$(Room 3), $68~m^2$(Room 4) and their respective starting point (S) and target point (T). User rotation at the start of the task is indicated by an arrow on the starting point.