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Abstract

Teleportation is a widely used locomotion technique in Virtual Reality (VR) that allows users to move through a virtual environment. Traditionally, handheld controllers have been used for teleportation, however, recent advancements in VR hand tracking have opened the opportunity for more natural, intuitive and immersive controller-free teleportation. In this thesis, I design and develop novel hand-based teleportation techniques allowing users to perform teleportations in VR only using their hands without using any controllers. I explore two core aspects: (i) WriArm: Using hand gestures with combined wrist and arm movements for a complete controller-free hands-only teleportation technique in VR, (ii) PAWS: Considering different physical attributes of users to personalize the controller-free system to each user. Results show WriArm is 9% faster than the arm-based technique, and PAWS improves a further 10% over WriArm, especially for difficult destinations. Users also preferred my techniques and found them easier to use, making them a viable hand-based controller-free alternative for navigating VR environments. I conclude with design considerations for hands-only teleportation design for controller-free virtual reality.