MazeRunVR: An Open Benchmark for VR Locomotion Performance, Preference and Sickness in the Wild

Locomotion in virtual reality (VR) is one of the biggest problems for large scale adoption of VR applications. Yet, to our knowledge, there are few studies conducted in-the-wild to understand performance metrics and general user preference for different mechanics. In this paper, we present the first steps towards an open framework to create a VR locomotion benchmark. As a viability study, we investigate how well the users move in VR when using three different locomotion mechanics. It was played in over 124 sessions across 10 countries in a period of three weeks. The included prototype locomotion mechanics are arm swing,walk-in-place and trackpad movement. We found that over-all, users performed significantly faster using arm swing and trackpad when compared to walk-in-place. For subjective preference, arm swing was significantly more preferred over the other two methods. Finally for induced sickness, walk-in-place was the overall most sickness-inducing locomotion method.