Inattentional Blindness for Redirected Walking Using Dynamic Foveated Rendering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time redirected walking technique in VR that leverages inattentional blindness and foveated rendering, allowing spatially larger virtual environments without requiring stimulated saccades.

Contribution

The novel method uses natural saccades and blinks for framebuffer refresh, enhancing VR navigation without additional stimuli, and is effective in both small and large physical spaces.

Findings

Effective in large physical spaces

Utilizes natural eye movements for framebuffer refresh

Supported by three user studies

Abstract

Redirected walking is a Virtual Reality(VR) locomotion technique which enables users to navigate virtual environments (VEs) that are spatially larger than the available physical tracked space. In this work we present a novel technique for redirected walking in VR based on the psychological phenomenon of inattentional blindness. Based on the user's visual fixation points we divide the user's view into zones. Spatially-varying rotations are applied according to the zone's importance and are rendered using foveated rendering. Our technique is real-time and applicable to small and large physical spaces. Furthermore, the proposed technique does not require the use of stimulated saccades but rather takes advantage of naturally occurring saccades and blinks for a complete refresh of the framebuffer. We performed extensive testing and present the analysis of the results of three user studies conducted for the evaluation.