Towards virtual reality infinite walking: Dynamic saccadic redirection

Qi Sun, Anjul Patney, Li Yi Wei, Omer Shapira, Jingwan Lu, Paul Asente, Suwen Zhu, Morgan McGuire, David Luebke, Arie Kaufman

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Redirected walking techniques can enhance the immersion and visualvestibular comfort of virtual reality (VR) navigation, but are often limited by the size, shape, and content of the physical environments. We propose a redirected walking technique that can apply to small physical environments with static or dynamic obstacles. Via a head- and eyetracking VR headset, our method detects saccadic suppression and redirects the users during the resulting temporary blindness. Our dynamic path planning runs in real-time on a GPU, and thus can avoid static and dynamic obstacles, including walls, furniture, and other VR users sharing the same physical space. To further enhance saccadic redirection, we propose subtle gaze direction methods tailored for VR perception. We demonstrate that saccades can significantly increase the rotation gains during redirection without introducing visual distortions or simulator sickness. This allows our method to apply to large open virtual spaces and small physical environments for room-scale VR. We evaluate our system via numerical simulations and real user studies.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article numberA28
    JournalACM Transactions on Graphics
    Volume37
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2018

    Keywords

    • human perception
    • redirected walking
    • saccade
    • virtual reality

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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