Validating and Expanding on the World Bending VR Locomotion for Arbitrary Distance Teleportation

The thesis validates and extends the World Bending Teleport proposed by Luca Barre, which is a VR locomotion technique that bends the virtual world spherically around the user so that distant and previously occluded areas become directly visible. In the original method, far-away geometry is projected upward onto a virtual dome, allowing users to aim and teleport to locations that would normally be hidden behind terrain or buildings.

Building on this foundation, the present work adds height and depth cues, a refined zoom interface for precise target selection, and an optional flattened projection to further reduce occlusion. An improved Mini-Map locomotion system was developed as a comparison baseline.

In a user study with 26 participants across both a dense city and a large-scale castle environment, the enhanced World Bending Teleport proved not only significantly more efficient for long-distance navigation, but also comparably fast for short-distance tasks, while maintaining low motion-sickness levels and providing a stronger sense of presence.

Description

The World Bending Teleport is implemented as a shader-based locomotion technique in Unreal Engine. When activated, a custom vertex shader bends the virtual environment upward around the user, forming a spherical projection that exposes distant areas that would normally be hidden behind walls or terrain. This projection is computed by shifting each vertex along a spherical deformation curve and then restoring its original height. My work extends this shader with additional layers of information and interaction tools.

The concept of the World Bending Teleport & a demonstration of the zoom.

To address missing depth cues from the original approach, two forms of elevation feedback were implemented: a numerical height display attached to the teleport pointer and colored height-contour lines rendered directly onto the terrain. These lines are generated by sampling each vertex’s world-space height and mapping it to a custom color gradient, allowing users to estimate elevation even while the world is bent.

For targeting precision, the system includes a redesigned zoom interface. A dedicated low-FOV camera renders a magnified view of the pointer region onto a world-space display that dynamically repositions itself within a tolerance zone. This avoids the jitter typically caused by hand movement while still allowing detailed inspection of distant structures. An optional flat-projection mode modifies the shader’s height-restoration step, compressing tall geometry to prevent it from blocking the user’s line of sight.

Left: Comparison of the normal view, the view using World Bending and using the flat-projection mode. Right: Demonstration of the Mini-Map

To support a controlled evaluation, a fully interactive Mini-Map teleportation system was also implemented. It includes continuous zooming, panning, and a directional player marker to improve orientation. The study was carried out in two custom-built environments: a dense City scene for testing short-range navigation in cluttered spaces, and a kilometer-scale Castle landscape for assessing performance across long distances. Both environments were instrumented with predefined task locations and data-logging systems integrated into the Unreal Engine framework.

Destinations of the City (left) and Castle (right) test environments

Results

The user study with 26 participants showed that the extended World Bending Teleport substantially improves long-distance navigation. In the Castle environment, participants needed far fewer teleports, reached destinations significantly faster, and showed a large effect size in reduced effort compared to the Mini-Map method. In the City environment, the method performed equally fast on short-distance tasks, cutting both task completion times and teleport counts roughly in half compared to the earlier implementation. Motion sickness remained low for both methods.

Despite the Mini-Map receiving slightly higher subjective usability ratings, the System Usability Scale (SUS) score for the improved World Bending Teleport was still classified as “excellent”, confirming high overall usability. Participants additionally reported a stronger sense of presence and rated the method as more immersive and engaging, making it the preferred approach even when the Mini-Map felt more familiar.

Comparison of accumulated times per user in each test environment and locomotion method (left) and System Usability Scale scores (right)

The Igroup Presence Questionnaire results for the dimensions general (G), spatial presence (SP), and involvement (INV) for each environment and locomotion method.

The mean scores and 95% confidence intervals of the number of teleportations and time needed as well as the SUS scores of Barre’s and our results. For readability, the labels for World Bending (WB) and Mini-Map (MM) are abbreviated.

Files

Full version of the bachelor's thesis

License

This original work is copyright by University of Bremen.
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