The Effects of Spatial Configuration on Relative Translation Gain Thresholds in Redirected Walking

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different spatial configurations in virtual environments influence the threshold range of Relative Translation Gains in Redirected Walking, providing guidelines to optimize space rescaling in VR.

Contribution

It is the first study to analyze the impact of environmental composition on RTG thresholds considering visual perception factors in VR.

Findings

Spatial configuration significantly affects RTG thresholds.

Object placement and room size influence user perception and movement.

Guidelines for virtual space rescaling based on environment layout.

Abstract

In this study, we explore how spatial configurations can be reflected in determining the threshold range of Relative Translation Gains (RTGs), a translation gain-based Redirected Walking (RDW) technique that scales the user's movement in Virtual Reality (VR) in different ratios for width and depth. While previous works have shown that various cognitive factors or individual differences influence the RDW threshold, constructive studies investigating the impact of the environmental composition on the RDW threshold with regard to the user's visual perception were lacking. Therefore, we examined the effect of spatial configurations on the RTG threshold by analyzing the participant's responses and gaze distribution data in two user studies. The first study concerned the size of the virtual room and the existence of objects within it, and the second study focused on the combined impact of room size and the spatial layout. Our results show that three compositions of spatial configuration (size, object existence, spatial layout) significantly affect the RTG threshold range. Based on our findings, we proposed virtual space rescaling guidelines to increase the range of adjustable movable space with RTGs for developers: placing distractors in the room, setting the perceived movable space to be larger than the adjusted movable space if it's an empty room, and avoid placing objects together as centered layout. Our findings can be used to adaptively rescale VR users' space according to the target virtual space's configuration with a unified coordinate system that enables the utilization of physical objects in a virtual scene.