Illusioneering Lab Wins Best Paper Award at IEEE VR 2025

Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) PhD student Tongyu Nie earned the IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) Best Paper Award for their paper titled, “Peripheral Teleportation: A Rest Frame Design to Mitigate Cybersickness During Virtual Locomotion.” Nie is advised by CS&E Associate Professor Evan Suma Rosenberg.  

“This is a very big achievement for me and all of the colleagues in our lab,” Nie said. “I think this is a collective effort and we are very proud of this work. This work gives me the encouragement to keep pursuing novel techniques in VR. I plan to continue exploring peripheral teleportation. I did not expect this, but I’m humbled to see it happen.”

Nie’s paper explores a novel technique to tackle cybersickness, which is one of the most pressing issues in VR. Previously the most effective way to mitigate cybersickness was to reduce the field of view for the user by blacking out peripheral vision. This approach has been shown to reduce cybersickness, however, it ultimately compromises the user experience. Nie proposed a new technique called peripheral teleportation, which replaces the black screen peripheral view with two stationary cameras in the virtual environment.

“Each camera has consecutive teleportation, which allows for discrete movement that follows your motion trajectory,” Nie said. “The motion of these two cameras is only affected by the user’s physical head movement, which creates a rest frame so users can feel stationary. The rest frame images are Earth-referenced and pulled from the VR environment, which is a new concept.”

Nie and team conducted a study to compare their new technique with the industry standard. The 90-person experiment showed that the peripheral teleportation significantly reduced cybersickness than the black restrictor.  

“Participants that used this new technique reported lower levels of discomfort compared to the controlled condition and the field-of-view restrictor, which was the common industry standard,” Suma Rosenberg said. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experiment to show that this peripheral teleportation technique could mitigate cybersickness and do better than the standard technique that is widely used in commercial VR experiences. This new technique could be added to the VR toolbox and widely applicable to VR scenarios. We need to do more follow-up studies, but it is a very exciting start.”

Moving forward, Nie plans to continue exploring this method and examining how peripheral teleportation affects depth perception and spatial awareness. 

“I received so much guidance from Evan and I am fortunate to have such a great advisor,” Nie said. “Evan encouraged me to come up with research ideas on my own, take the risk of introducing a new technique, and stay optimistic when my previous attempts failed. These results are particularly notable because, to the best of our knowledge, peripheral teleportation is the first software-based cybersickness mitigation technique that has significantly outperformed the field of view restrictor.”

Learn more about the best paper award on the IEEE VR conference website.