Blink

Blink
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Information
Type	Standing, Room-scale
Required Devices	Motion-tracked controllers
Description	Builds upon Teleportation to create 3 more types of movement techniques called Cinematic Blink, Precision Blink and Volume Blink
Pros	Reduce simulator sickness, allows for the scaling of play space sizes
Cons	Negative impact on immersion, as acknowledged by its developer
Creator	Cloudhead Games
Examples	The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, The Gallery - Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone

Blink is a Locomotion Method. It is a teleportation-based movement system for room-scale virtual reality developed by Cloudhead Games for its adventure series The Gallery. The player picks a destination, the view fades to black, and it fades back in at the new position, so the camera never glides through the scene. Cloudhead subtitled the system "Elastic VR Playspace" and described it as "a point, click and teleport system which removes the uncomfortable elements of virtual travel by snapping you to a position and orientation defined by you instantly."

Cloudhead announced Blink in August 2015, showed it on the HTC Vive at PAX Prime 2015, and shipped it in The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed on 5 April 2016. Blink pairs short-range teleports with a projection of the player's physical play area, so that the tracked room can be repositioned inside a larger virtual world.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every new or changed claim, quote, date and citation against the 13 cited Road to VR, UploadVR, Game Developer, Voices of VR, Steam, Cloudhead Games and IEEE TVCG sources, and diffed against the prior page. About review dates.

Additional Information

Created by Cloudhead Games, Blink is a locomotion method originally developed for The Gallery series. Designed to eliminate simulator sickness and operate in various play space sizes, Blink builds upon the Teleportation method. Blink is divided into 3 types of movements: Cinematic Blink, Precision Blink and Volume Blink. Cinematic Blink allows players to look at a location then press a button on the controller to travel there. Precision Blink allows players to display a marker at their destination. Players can use the marker to teleport to a specific location. Volume Blink adds to the previous 2 systems. It uses a marker and a square / circular border that shows not only the destination but also the amount of space players can walk around in after teleporting.

• Blink is designed for a standing and room-scale playing experience.

How it works

In the version Cloudhead demonstrated in 2015, the length of the button press selected the mode. In Cinematic Blink the player looks toward a destination and presses a button; the current view fades to black and fades back in at the new spot. Holding the button longer opens more detailed placement options, which UploadVR noted suit players with limited play areas. In Volume Blink, the player projects the edges of their tracked area into the virtual scene as glowing lines and rotates that outline before committing, so the new orientation and the walkable boundary are visible in advance. Joel Green, Cloudhead's producer and audio director, explained on the Voices of VR podcast that the player moves a thumb around the Vive controller's trackpad to turn the projected room, placing the objects they want to reach inside their physical space; after the jump they walk around that space normally. As he put it, "if you have a very large room, you have to blink less, essentially, right?"

The transition is timed to distance. Writing about the game's design, Cloudhead's Denny Unger said that "the further you teleport away, the longer the fade to black lasts and the more footfalls you hear." Cloudhead's developers later wrote that the duration of the Blink "was directly proportional to the actual distance you wanted to travel," and that the studio's sound designer added foot foley "so you could actually hear yourself walking as you Blinked."

Blink works together with Cloudhead's "elastic playspace" approach, which scales the game to the room the player has. A glowing outline of the play area sits near the floor and grows brighter as the player nears an edge. Creative director Denny Unger told UploadVR, "One of the ways you actually make people move around in a compelling and freeing way, is you have to show them their bounds." According to the same report, the game suggests good teleport locations and teleports the player back to their original location if they walk through an obstacle such as a cave wall. Cloudhead's developers also wrote that visible bounds helped "the player feel safe within their space" when teleporting.

History

Development

Cloudhead Games' locomotion experiments began in late 2013 with the Razer Hydra motion controller, at a time when the Oculus Rift DK1 headset offered only rotational tracking. Near the end of 2014 Valve showed SteamVR, which became the HTC Vive, to Cloudhead and a few other developers at a private summit. Unger later wrote that room-scale was "a dramatic shift in design" and that the studio had to rebuild the game's framework to fit it. An early photogrammetry scan of Valve's office, in which users could teleport between "information" nodes, influenced its first teleport experiments. By summer 2015 Cloudhead had removed the nodes and let players teleport anywhere within set limits, and it replaced an instant jump with a fade to black because an instant move "hurt the pace of how we wanted the game to feel." Unger described the system as starting from "a simple teleport" and gradually adding a targeting reticle, a preview of the player's orientation after the move, a display of the new play-space boundary, rotation of the projected play volume, the fade to black, and timed footfalls.

Announcement and release

Cloudhead released a video presented by Unger in August 2015 that introduced the three Blink techniques under the "Elastic VR Playspace" name. On 20 August 2015 Road to VR reported that the studio would show Blink and new footage of Call of the Starseed on the HTC Vive at PAX Prime 2015 in Seattle. The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed launched on 5 April 2016, and its Steam page describes "Cloudhead's dynamically scaling BLINK locomotion system."

Later changes

In September 2016 Unger told UploadVR that the studio was "continuing to prototype new locomotion solutions as an alternate method of transportation to Blink." After Oculus Touch controllers came out in December 2016, Cloudhead changed Blink's default so that it cast from the hand, letting players point at a destination instead of aiming with the head, and added a ballistic trajectory arc that the team said "felt more intuitive to our players." The team tested other comfort options for artificial locomotion but concluded that "Blink was still the right feel for the game," because it suited the game's cinematic style, was comfortable for a broad audience and encouraged players to move around their physical space. In 2018 the developers said they wanted to release a future "Mutant Locomotion" scheme combining their methods, with Blink on the right hand, Comfort Turn inputs on either side of the analogue stick or touch pad, and free locomotion on the left hand.

The Gallery - Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone was released on 18 October 2017 for Oculus, Steam and Viveport. Blink teleportation carried over from the first episode and remained the default, with smooth locomotion added as an option that players must switch on. As of September 2026, Cloudhead's page for Call of the Starseed lists the game on PlayStation VR2, Meta Quest and SteamVR, and still names the "dynamically scaling BLINK locomotion system" as its way of moving through the world.

Reception

Kent Bye of the Voices of VR podcast, who has said he is prone to motion sickness in VR, played a 15 to 20 minute demo with Blink in 2015 without symptoms. In its review of Heart of the Emberstone, Road to VR said the default blink teleportation "makes for an exceedingly comfortable experience for anyone, from novice to expert VR user."

Problems

Cloudhead Games has acknowledged a trade-off. In 2016 Unger said that teleportation "solves most of the problems associated with vestibular disconnect" but "does have a negative impact on immersion," and that none of the team believed it was "the end-game for VR locomotion." The studio's developers later wrote that teleportation lets designers control what the player can reach and see, but "can also feel limiting to the player." Blink also asks players to keep track of two positions at once; Green said players need "dual awareness of where they're located within their physical space as well as where they're located within VR."

Research on fade-to-black teleport transitions in general, the effect Blink uses, has found mixed results. In a study of system-controlled viewpoint changes published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Florida compared an instant teleport with a 1.5-second fade to black among 18 participants. They found no evidence of a difference in spatial awareness or sickness between the two. Most participants said the fade made the view change easier to understand, but 9 of 16 who answered found it more disrupting, which the authors attributed to its longer duration and the brief loss of the view.

Solutions

Cloudhead's second episode kept Blink but added alternatives. Heart of the Emberstone offered controller-oriented and head-oriented stick movement, strafing and variable speeds for players who prefer smooth locomotion, although turning in that mode was limited to snap turns. The developers also argued for locomotion designed around each game rather than a long list of interchangeable options.

See also

• Teleportation
• Artificial locomotion
• Locomotion
• Chaperone
• VR sickness
• Redirected walking