Enemies are catching up to you. You swivel your spaceship out of there while pumping out 50 bullets a minute, every which way. You defeat the boss ship and successfully escape the invasion. ‘Congratulations on clearing the mission’ pops out in front of you. You unstrap the headset off of your face and fall down.
That’s the notorious vection at play and a rather ironic transition from virtual reality to actual reality. If you love VR as much as the next guy, you know how easy it is to lose yourself in the game. Particularly, when it is a nail-biting, adrenaline-kicking one. Removing the VR headset can sometimes cause the reality to come crashing down on you. Literally.
From being labeled as a gimmick to be called a fluke, virtual reality has heard it all. There’s been a lot of chatter about VR locomotion and people have come up with a number of solutions to deal with it. While some offer a practical solution, others are downright absurd, leaving people to fight nausea and nasty hangovers.
So, we decided to take matters in our own hands and come up with a solution that will mesh users with their virtual world without asking them to get drunk on nausea and stagger to an immersive hangover.
Teleportation is the most popular locomotion system, allowing you to walk and run in VR games. While sprint, dash and blink teleportation have already made a splashy entrance in the market, they are not practical in every situation. In the series of VR locomotion, Big Immersive has created a new method of teleportation that we call teleblur.
When you’re running or moving fast, while the details of the world don’t fade away around you your peripheral vision does become a little blur and some may even experience tunnel vision. What teleblur does is that once you pick a spot to move to and press the trigger to teleport, the world around you blurs slightly as you move through space.
So how did we do it?
As long as the teleportation points are in your view, you can pinpoint the area and jump to it instantly. It doesn’t matter if you’re standing 1 foot or 10 feet away from the point, the press of the trigger will teleport you to the destination in the same amount of time i.e. 0.5 seconds. Pairing post-processing effects of the camera and optimal speed with other movement mechanics, teleblur makes it look like a gradual transition to the destination instead of blinking in or out of the screen or compromising on the FOV.
The blur system creates a bridge between your current spot and destination, keeping the visceral feeling of moving intact. Instead of fading out the scene to be positioned in a new location when the scene fades in again, teleblur lets you retain a connection with your surroundings while keeping it as close to reality as possible.
As vection is unlikely to be entirely eliminated in the current state of technology, we have kept the immersion vs comfort tradeoff in mind to effectively reduce the chances of motion sickness. Teleblur is our way to ensure that you enjoy true immersion without signing yourself up for a nauseous weekend.