Multi-User Redirected Walking in Separate Physical Spaces for Online VR Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-user redirected walking method for online VR that reduces resets and enhances immersion by predicting reset timing and coordinating user poses across separate physical spaces.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multi-user RDW approach that minimizes resets by estimating obstacle encounters and synchronizing user poses, improving collaborative VR experiences.

Findings

Reduces total number of resets in multi-user VR scenarios

Outperforms existing RDW methods in experiments

Enhances user immersion and continuous exploration

Abstract

With the recent rise of Metaverse, online multiplayer VR applications are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Allowing users to move easily in virtual environments is crucial for high-quality experiences in such collaborative VR applications. This paper focuses on redirected walking technology (RDW) to allow users to move beyond the confines of the limited physical environments (PE). The existing RDW methods lack the scheme to coordinate multiple users in different PEs, and thus have the issue of triggering too many resets for all the users. We propose a novel multi-user RDW method that is able to significantly reduce the overall reset number and give users a better immersive experience by providing a more continuous exploration. Our key idea is to first find out the "bottleneck" user that may cause all users to be reset and estimate the time to reset, and then redirect all the users to favorable poses during that maximized bottleneck time to ensure the subsequent resets can be postponed as much as possible. More particularly, we develop methods to estimate the time of possibly encountering obstacles and the reachable area for a specific pose to enable the prediction of the next reset caused by any user. Our experiments and user study found that our method outperforms existing RDW methods in online VR applications.