Redirecting Walking and Driving for Natural Navigation in Immersive Virtual Environments
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 18 (4):
538-545 (2012)Abstract
Walking is considered to be the most basic and natural form of locomotion for humans, and implementations of real walking
interfaces in immersive virtual environments (VEs) have demonstrated their benefits for several navigation tasks. With recently
proposed redirection techniques it becomes possible to overcome space limitations as imposed by tracking sensors or laboratory
setups, and, theoretically, it is now possible to walk through arbitrarily large VEs. However, walking as sole locomotion technique has
drawbacks, in particular, for long distances, such that even in the real world we tend to support walking over short distances with the
use of passive or active transportation devices for longer-distance travel.
In this article we introduce a combination of walking-and-driving in immersive VEs by transferring findings from the field of redirected
walking to a new class of motion interfaces. In contrast to existing motion interfaces, for instance, based on locomotion devices, which
usually maintain the user in a stationary position in the real world, we consider motion devices that do not prevent displacements of the
user, but which actually move the user through the physical space. We show that redirection concepts can be applied to self-motion
with such devices. Therefore, we conducted psychophysical experiments to determine perceptual detection thresholds for redirected
driving, and set these in relation to results from redirected walking. We show that redirected walking-and-driving approaches can
easily be realized in immersive virtual reality laboratories, e. g., with electric wheelchairs, and show that such systems can combine
advantages of real walking in confined spaces with benefits of using vehicle-based self-motion for longer-distance traveling.
