Abstract

One of the great advantages of VR is that people can get experiences even if it is impossible or impractical to realise these experiences in the physical world. One such experience is flying like a bird with ones own wings. We present a novel motion-based 3D flying locomotion technique for VR that simulates winged flying. We prioritise free and intuitive control of the interaction where the user can fly in all 4 directions including backwards. The movement is based only on tracking of handheld controllers. We have performed an experiment with different settings of flight and rotation speeds to identify the setting combination inducing the minimum sickness and maximum embodiment and performance. The task is to fly through a virtual obstacle course as fast as possible. Out of the 6 tested settings, with 3 different speed settings for flight and 2 settings for rotation, we recommend the setting with fastest rotation and flight speeds for further research. Here participants felt the least amount of sickness and had a time performance just 4s behind the best performing setting. The latter used the slowest rotation and highest flight speed but also the second-worst SSQ score.