Evaluation of walking in place on a Wii balance board to explore a virtual environment

  • Authors:
  • Betsy Williams;Stephen Bailey;Gayathri Narasimham;Muqun Li;Bobby Bodenheimer

  • Affiliations:
  • Rhodes College, Memphis, TN;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP)
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this work, we present a method of “Walking In Place” (WIP) on the Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board to explore a virtual environment. We directly compare our method to joystick locomotion and normal walking. The joystick proves inferior to physically walking and to WIP on the Wii Balance Board (WIP--Wii). Interestingly, we find that physically exploring an environment on foot is equivalent in terms of spatial orientation to exploring an environment using our WIP--Wii method. This implies that the WIP--Wii is a good inexpensive alternative to exploring a virtual environment and it may be well--suited for exploring large virtual environments.