Movement in VR

There has been allot of talk about how do you design a game around a 15 foot square space? I think the simple answer is you dont, and most game worlds will likely be larger and allot of movement will be done the same way it is in a seated experience. But avoiding controller based rotation will cut out allot of sim sickness alone, as well as being able to do allot of small movement in however big the free space in your room is. To avoid vection entirely you can use teleportation as a comfort mode, but as allot of puzzles in games involve the aspect of "how do you get there?" a common convention might be that when you manipulate the thumbstick or pad you see your avatar walk away from you in third person and move it as a traditional 3rd person game until you decide to teleport to its new location. Steady movements in a strait line without accelerations are also fairly comfortable so instead of using analog based controls a better binary way might be to just have a button that sets your motion in the direction you are pointing, or your controller is pointing, traveling in a strait line at constant speed until you hit the button again to cancel or are stopped by an obstacle. Another comfort option would be to alpha in the holodeck walls during the moving-still transition to keep a static reference frame, or even black out the virtual world for a few frames to avoid seeing the aceleration. You could also turn Dpad movement into lots of small teleportation jumps half half a second or so each. Different people will want different levels of comfort which will keep programmers busy putting lots of tick boxes in the options menu.

An interesting take on a teleport gun would be a variant of the portal gun, where the projectile lands a portal gate is erected with the other end being in the middle of your room so you can step through it to the other place and shoot another portal which will connect to the portal in the middle of your room again. This would have the benefit of bringing the player to the middle of there VR space each time they walk through a portal. Probably not something that could just be added to any game though would have to be an integral part of the game design and storyverse. It would obviously fit in the Aperture science world but it could also work in a magical world. You could also make a confusing maze out of lots of little rooms with portals in them.

Height is also important consideration. Cloudhead mentioned trying there game on children and finding that they could not reach an important object in a puzzle. But putting everything close to the ground for children and dwarfs would make tall people bend down all the time. And Level designers line things up for standard player height sight lines so you can see important and pretty things with artistic composition, dwarfs could miss allot by not being able to see out of windows etc. So the only real solution to this is scaling the entire world consistently till the player is the height the game was designed for, even if it does also make all over objects including NPC's seem small and toy like to children and dwarfs. Wether its by scaling the measurement units of the games world or the tracking volume it amounts to the same thing, just make sure the IPD head model stays 1 to 1 with the tracking volume, and the floor stays where the real floor is, otherwise you will get bad VR. It would also give short people the benefit of making the tracking volume cover a larger section of the virtual world and giving them less distance to walk, and making game induced motion less aggressive, it is also recommended for seated experience as having the floor further away than the real floor makes peoples perception wonky and the sight line reasons.

EDIT A few of other solutions that I have since seen posted elsewhere

running on the spot http://gfycat.com/FilthyClassicGoldeneye

This could be disorientating http://i.imgur.com/5lGssux.png

Not sure if this is better than thumbstick http://imgur.com/Bj8Fsic the circles would need to be clearly marked, might actually work better in a more restricted space with smaller circles.

Feel free to suggest more