Towards imperceptible redirected walking: integrating a distractor into the immersive experience.

ABSTRACTPhysically walking in a virtual world has been repeatedly demonstrated to be superior to navigation with game controllers and the like. The problem is that virtual worlds are often much larger than the available physical space. Redirected walking, a technique in which the users orientation in the physical space is constantly and imperceptibly changed from their orientation in the virtual world, has been shown to be an effective technique for walking in a limited physical space [Razzaque et al. 2001], but it needs frequent and rapid head rotation to keep the reorientation changes imperceptible. A rapidly moving object in the environment, a distractor, has been shown to be effective at inspiring the users to rapidly rotate their head, but such a distractor can be distracting to the user's main activity in the virtual world. We introduce the notion of the distractor being integrated into the user's main activity in the virtual world - in our example, a fire-breathing dragon into an immersive adventure game. With such an integrated character, the users do not need any special instructions about redirected walking; they are simply performing their intended activities. We report the results of a small (N=24) user study which indicates that for the majority of subjects (17 of 24) the illusion is maintained of unconstrained walking in a very large area (a full-sized basketball court, 45 × 90 feet) even while they were limited to a small, 16 × 16 feet region. We speculate that this technique may extend to many other applications in which the distractor can be integrated into the major immersive activity and thus enable the illusion of natural, unconstrained walking in large virtual worlds even when only a small physical space is available.