[MUSIC] Another way to travel in VR is a method called teleporting. With teleporting, users can travel from one place to another by looking at the new place, selecting it, and the next moment they're in the new position. The new place users wish to travel to is often called the target location. In some applications, several target locations are predefined. And users can either look at a target or point at one with the controller to indicate which one they wish to travel to. For instance, you can have little beacons populated in the environment, each indicating our target location. The other applications, instead of predefined targets, the users are free to teleport anywhere on the ground by either looking or pointing at a arbitrary position. In both cases, it is important to give some kind of video feedback to the user to confirm their selection of the target location. Normally by changing the color of the beacon they are looking at or creating some other visual effect to highlight the very position chosen by the user. Once the user received the confirmation feedback from the system that a correct target position has been selected, they can press a button to virtually travel there. Or if you're using a VR system without any buttons, you can teleport a user to a target location by letting them look at the target for longer than a certain amount of time. For instance, three seconds to confirm their selection. Pressing a button is obviously a more efficient way than having to look at a target location for three seconds. It allows the users to travel from one place to another much quicker and gives the user a greater sense of control and immersion, as they don't need to pause from the current interaction. Once the system received the user's command to travel to a different place, there are different ways the system could then bring the user to the target place by repositioning the virtual camera. However, it is a good idea to try to preserve a user's current head rotation when bringing the user to the new location. But still, users could feel quite disoriented when they just landed in a new place. In order to reduce the feeling of disorientation, there are several things you can do. First, instead of just repositioning the virtual camera from one frame to the next, you could do this over a couple frames by generating some of the frames in between. So the users feel as if they fly very quickly from one place to another. When doing so, you might wish to make the images from the in-between frames quite blurry in order to avoid simulation sickness. Second, you can give another visual cue to the user for them to better accustom to the new position. Especially if you do wish to change the orientation of the user when you place them in a new location. You can do so by putting an avatar at a target location, maybe something semitransparent. This avatar should be facing the same direction the user will be when they arrive at the target location, which could be the same or different from user's current orientation. This method uses the fact that subconsciously we're constantly trying to figure out what other people around us can see. So by putting an avatar which represents the new position and orientation we will be, it uses mechanisms in our brain to help prepare us for the new location and makes us feel less disoriented. Finally, another point worth mentioning here is the fact that all the other methods introduced so far, apart from teleporting, are only suitable for model-based VR, but not 360-degree video. That is because traveling in a virtual space implies having access to the 3D models of the virtual world so you can render the images from any arbitrary position within the 3D model. With 360-degree video, we're simply recording images from a fixed position rather than capturing the actual 3D objects from the real world. So we can't bring users to a position we didn't film from. However, there is nothing stopping us from using several cameras to capture the same 360-degree video from several different positions. For instance, in the application of watching football in the stadium via 360-degree feeds, we could choose a couple places to capture the game from. And the users could choose where they want to watch the match from and change their position anytime. [MUSIC]
