Does Teleporting Length Affect Spatial Awareness?

Teleporting, or jumping, is a common method of moving through virtual environments. It provides a simple user interface, but deprives users of self-motion cues that are important to acquiring spatial knowledge. This paper examines one parameter of the teleportation interface, the teleportation or jump distance, and how that may affect spatial knowledge acquisition. We report the results of an experiment that examined the effects of two different, but fixed teleportation distances on how users could acquire knowledge of landmarks and routes. The results suggest that the teleport distance does not matter, hence teleportation as an interface is robust. However, use of teleportation resulted in significantly increased simulator sickness, a surprising result.