A psychophysically calibrated controller for navigating through large environments in a limited free-walking space

  • Authors:
  • David Engel;Cristóbal Curio;Lili Tcheang;Betty Mohler;Heinrich H. Bülthoff

  • Affiliations:
  • MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen;MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen;University College London;MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen;MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Experience indicates that the sense of presence in a virtual environment is enhanced when the participants are able to actively move through it. When exploring a virtual world by walking, the size of the model is usually limited by the size of the available tracking space. A promising way to overcome these limitations are motion compression techniques, which decouple the position in the real and virtual world by introducing imperceptible visual-proprioceptive conflicts. Such techniques usually precalculate the redirection factors, greatly reducing their robustness. We propose a novel way to determine the instantaneous rotational gains using a controller based on an optimization problem. We present a psychophysical study that measures the sensitivity of visual-proprioceptive conflicts during walking and use this to calibrate a real-time controller. We show the validity of our approach by allowing users to walk through virtual environments vastly larger than the tracking space.