Supporting free walking in a large virtual environment: imperceptible redirected walking with an immersive distractor

ABSTRACT

Redirected walking, a technique in which the user's orientation in the physical space is constantly and imperceptibly changed from their orientation in the virtual world, has been shown to be an effective technique when only a limited physical space is available. Unfortunately, previous efforts have restricted redirected walking applications to operate under the constant supervision of researchers to prevent the users from leaving the tracked area. In addition, Virtual Environments (VE) used in these applications were often limited to narrow hallways, mazes or predefined waypoints, while the performance of redirected walking in a large, open VE is not well explored. In this paper, we introduce the idea and implementation for an imperceptible redirected walking system that supports the illusion of free walking in a large, open virtual environment with minimal amount of physical interventions, by integrating the distractor into the user's main immersive activity in the VE. We demonstrate this new approach with two user studies of an immersive interactive game. Our study indicates that for the majority of the subjects, the illusion is maintained of unconstrained walking in a very large area (a full-size basketball court, 50 feet × 95 feet), even while they were limited to a physical area of a mere 6% of the size of the basketball court (16 feet × 16 feet tracked area). Our result demonstrates that the illusion of free walking is created, since a majority of them was not interrupted by the researchers and did not realize they were redirected, and the 34 subjects took vastly different routes to reach the distant goal (See Figure 2). We believe that this technique demonstrates a more immersive way of designing redirected walking application and shows possibility of bringing redirected walking applications out of the monitored lab environments. Our result may provide insights for the designers of immersive experiences to create other redirected walking applications for consumer VR systems with room-size tracking.

References

1. Eric Hodgson, Eric Bachmann, and David Waller. 2008. Redirected Walking to Explore Virtual Environments: Assessing the Potential for Spatial Interference. ACM Trans. Appl. Percept. 8, 4 (2008), 22:1--22:22.
2. Tabitha C Peck, Henry Fuchs, and Mary C Whitton. 2010. Improved redirection with distractors: A large-scale-real-walking locomotion interface and its effect on navigation in virtual environments. In Virtual Reality Conference (VR), 2010 IEEE. IEEE, 35--38.
3. Sharif Razzaque, Zachariah Kohn, and Mary C Whitton. 2001. Redirected walking. In Proceedings of EUROGRAPHICS, Vol. 9. Citeseer, 105--106.
4. Frank Steinicke, Gerd Bruder, Jason Jerald, Harald Frenz, and Markus Lappe. 2008. Analyses of human sensitivity to redirected walking. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology. ACM, 149--156.
5. F. Steinicke, G. Bruder, J. Jerald, H. Frenz, and M. Lappe. 2010. Estimation of Detection Thresholds for Redirected Walking Techniques. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16, 1 (2010), 17--27.
6. E. A. Suma, G. Bruder, F. Steinicke, D. M. Krum, and M. Bolas. 2012. A taxonomy for deploying redirection techniques in immersive virtual environments. In 2012 IEEE Virtual Reality Workshops (VRW). IEEE, 43--46.
7. Qi Sun, Li-Yi Wei, and Arie Kaufman. 2016. Mapping virtual and physical reality. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 35, 4 (2016), 64.
8. Betsy Williams, Gayathri Narasimham, Bjoern Rump, Timothy P. McNamara, Thomas H. Carr, John Rieser, and Bobby Bodenheimer. 2007. Exploring Large Virtual Environments with an HMD when Physical Space is Limited. In Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV '07). ACM, 41--48.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

      • Virtual reality

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • HCI design and evaluation methods

      • User studies