Design of Mentally and Physically Demanding Tasks as Distractors of Rotation Gains

Redirected walking enables natural walking in virtual reality under the constraints of limited physical space by manipulating position and orientation of the user. One such manipulation method are rotation gains which decouple real and virtual head turning. When reaching a boundary of the tracking space, the user's orientation can be reset by applying a rotation gain and forcing the user to do a certain task that requires head rotations. To identify what kind of tasks are best suited to mask the redirection, four tasks were designed that differentiate in their amount of mentally and physically demand: a spatial memory task, a verbal memory task, a physically exhausting task and a task which requires physical skill. A first pilot study was conducted to evaluate the influence that the different task categories have on the redirection awareness. The results showed overall low redirection detection rates, with the physically exhausting task being the least noticeable, whilst the physical skill task was detected the most, and the mentally demanding tasks in between. Although no clear distinction regarding the redirection awareness between mentally and physically demanding tasks could be shown, the insights gained from this work and the study, can be used to improve future implementations of rotation tasks.