Women are more likely to experience virtual reality (VR) sickness than men, which could pose a major challenge to the mass market success of VR. Because VR sickness often results from a visual-vestibular conflict, an effective strategy to mitigate conflict is to restrict the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion. Sex differences in spatial cognition have been well researched, with several studies reporting that men exhibit better spatial navigation performance in desktop three-dimensional environments than women. However, additional research suggests that this sex difference can be mitigated by providing a larger FOV as this increases the availability of landmarks, which women tend to rely on more than men. Though FOV restriction is already a widely used strategy for VR headsets to minimize VR sickness, it is currently not well understood if it impedes spatial learning in women due to decreased availability of landmarks. Our study (n=28, 14 men and 14 women) found that a dynamic FOV restrictor was equally effective in reducing VR sickness in both sexes, and no sex differences in VR sickness incidence were found. Our study did find a sex difference in spatial learning ability, but an FOV restrictor did not impede spatial learning in either sex.

Virtual reality (VR) has enjoyed significant popularity in recent years. Where navigation has been a fundamental appeal of 3D applications for decades, facilitating this in VR has been quite a challenge. Over the past decades, various virtual locomotion techniques (VLTs) have been developed that aim to offer natural, usable and efficient ways of navigating VR without inducing VR sickness. Several studies of these techniques have been conducted in order to evaluate their performance in various study conditions and virtual contexts. Taxonomies have also been proposed to either place similar techniques in meaningful categories or decompose them to their underlying design components. In this survey, we aim to aggregate and understand the current state of the art of VR locomotion research and discuss the design implications of VLTs in terms of strengths, weaknesses and applicability.

Recent studies show that women are more susceptible to visually-induced VR sickness, which might explain the low adoption rate of VR technology among women. Reducing field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion is already a widely used strategy to reduce VR sickness as it blocks peripheral optical flow perception and mitigates visual/vestibular conflict. Prior studies show that men are more adept at 3D spatial navigation than women, though this sex bias can be minimized by providing women with a larger FOV. Our study provides insight into the relationship between sex and FOV restriction with respect to VR sickness and spatial navigation performance which seem to conflict. We find the use of an FOV restrictor to be effective in mitigating VR sickness in both sexes while we did not find a negative effect of FOV restriction on spatial navigation performance.

Teleportation is a popular locomotion technique that lets users safely navigate beyond the confines of available positional tracking space without inducing VR sickness. Because available walking space is limited and teleportation is faster than walking, a risk with using teleportation is that users might end up abandoning walking input and only relying on teleportation, which is considered detrimental to presence. We present redirected teleportation; an improved version of teleportation that uses iterative non-obtrusive reorientation and repositioning using a portal to redirect the user back to the center of the tracking space, where available walking space is larger. A user study compares the effectiveness, accuracy, and usability of redirected teleportation with regular teleportation using a navigation task in three different environments. Results show that redirected teleportation allows for a better utilization of available tracking space than regular teleportation, as it requires significantly fewer teleportations, while users walk more and use a larger portion of the available tracking space.

People with visual impairments have been surrounded with myths and misconceptions that have made it challenging for them to live as productive members of the society and have partly contributed in making the majority live in substandard living conditions. To shift the public's focus from being on the disability to be on the abilities of the visually impaired, non-profit organizations and government agencies have conducted a series of campaigns to spread awareness about visual impairments. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, has become the primary channel to diffuse information to the public. The goal of this paper is to analyze the use of Twitter as a social media platform to spread information during visual impairments awareness campaigns. We focused our analysis on five key concerns: (i) the characteristics of active users during the event, (ii) the major players in information dissemination, (iii) the tweets' common topics (iv) the reachability of information, and (v) the temporal tweeting behavior. We report the results of the campaigns along with the design of an effective communication strategy of a campaign.

Navigating mobile virtual reality (VR) is a challenge due to limited input options and/or a requirement for handsfree interaction. Walking-in-place (WIP) is considered to offer a higher presence than controller input but only allows unidirectional navigation in the direction of the user's gaze--which impedes navigation efficiency. Leaning input enables omnidirectional navigation but currently relies on bulky controllers, which aren't feasible in mobile VR contexts. This note evaluates the use of head-tilt - implemented using inertial sensing - to allow for handsfree omnidirectional VR navigation on mobile VR platforms. A user study with 24 subjects compared three input methods using an obstacle avoidance navigation task: (1) head-tilt alone (TILT) (2) a hybrid method (WIP-TILT) that uses head tilting for direction and WIP to control speed; and (3) traditional controller input. TILT was significantly faster than WIP-TILT and joystick input, while WIP-TILT and TILT offered the highest presence. There was no difference in cybersickness between input methods.

People with visual impairments have a hard time getting consistent physical exercise, as they can not do some exercises, such as running outside, without a sighted guide. People with visual impairments have been shown to have higher spatial localization skills than sighted people, which lead us to believe that they could follow a drone on a running-track environment. This paper presents a feasibility study where we investigate the ability to localize and follow a low-cost flying drone in people with visual impairments. A Wizard of Oz style study was conducted with 2 blind participants. Our results indicate that blind individuals can accurately localize the drone and follow it. Qualitative results also indicate that the participants were comfortable with following the drone and had high efficacy when it came to following and localizing the drone. The study supports future development of a fully functioning prototype.