Redirected Walking in Infinite Virtual Indoor Environment Using Change-blindness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a change-blindness based redirected walking algorithm enabling users to explore infinite virtual indoor environments in real space without collision, enhancing immersion and reducing motion sickness.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel change-blindness technique for redirected walking that scales and translates virtual rooms seamlessly without user awareness, allowing infinite exploration in limited physical space.

Findings

Users experienced higher immersion and presence with the proposed method.

The method reduced motion sickness compared to existing approaches.

The detection threshold for change recognition was effectively used to guide room scaling.

Abstract

We present a change-blindness based redirected walking algorithm that allows a user to explore on foot a virtual indoor environment consisting of an infinite number of rooms while at the same time ensuring collision-free walking for the user in real space. This method uses change blindness to scale and translate the room without the user's awareness by moving the wall while the user is not looking. Consequently, the virtual room containing the current user always exists in the valid real space. We measured the detection threshold for whether the user recognizes the movement of the wall outside the field of view. Then, we used the measured detection threshold to determine the amount of changing the dimension of the room by moving that wall. We conducted a live-user experiment to navigate the same virtual environment using the proposed method and other existing methods. As a result, users reported higher usability, presence, and immersion when using the proposed method while showing reduced motion sickness compared to other methods. Hence, our approach can be used to implement applications to allow users to explore an infinitely large virtual indoor environment such as virtual museum and virtual model house while simultaneously walking in a small real space, giving users a more realistic experience.