Negotiated User-to-Group Teleportations in Social VR

The locomotion and interaction of multi-user groups are critical components of social virtual reality (VR), where users collaboratively navigate shared spaces defined by their relationships. As metaverse and social VR platforms evolve, safeguarding group spatial integrity becomes paramount. While teleportation-widely adopted for efficient navigation-enhances communication, it risks unintended intrusion into group spaces, compromising privacy and security. This paper presents two novel negotiated user-to-group teleportation techniques, paired with dynamic zone computation methods, to address these challenges. Our approach enables guest users to join groups through spatially aware teleportation, mediated by real-time negotiation. The negotiation interaction process is designed to facilitate users to negotiate teleportation locations efficiently and smoothly. To validate our techniques, we conducted a user study with 36 participants in a VR art museum environment, where they performed collaborative social-tour tasks. The findings demonstrate that our techniques significantly enhance group privacy protection, effectively support user-to-group negotiation of teleportation joining requirements, and alleviate anxiety associated with unwanted proximity within social VR groups.