Thesis Defence: Exploring Personalized Hands-Only Teleportation in Virtual Reality

Sohan Chowdhury, supervised by Dr. Mohammad Khalad Hasan, will defend their thesis titled “Exploring Personalized Hands-Only Teleportation in Virtual Reality” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science.

An abstract for Sohan’s thesis is included below.

Examinations are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public.

Please email khalad.hasan@ubc.ca to receive the zoom link for this defence.

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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 that my techniques are fast and easy to use making them a viable controller-free alternative for navigating VR environments. I conclude with design considerations for hands-only teleportation design for controller-free virtual reality.