VMotion: Designing a Seamless Walking Experience in VR

ABSTRACT

Physically walking in virtual reality can provide a satisfying sense of presence. However, natural locomotion in virtual worlds larger than the tracked space remains a practical challenge. Numerous redirected walking techniques have been proposed to overcome space limitations but they often require rapid head rotation, sometimes induced by distractors, to keep the scene rotation imperceptible. We propose a design methodology of seamlessly integrating redirection into the virtual experience that takes advantage of the perceptual phenomenon of inattentional blindness. Additionally, we present four novel visibility control techniques that work with our design methodology to minimize disruption to the user experience commonly found in existing redirection techniques. A user study (N = 16) shows that our techniques are imperceptible and users report significantly less dizziness when using our methods. The illusion of unconstrained walking in a large area (16 x 8m) is maintained even though users are limited to a smaller (3.5 x 3.5m) physical space.

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Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

    • Multimedia information systems