Over the next decade, immersive technologies have the potential to revolutionize how people communicate over distance, how they learn, train, and operate in challenging physical environments, and how they visualize, understand, and make decisions based on an ever-growing landscape of complex data. However, despite rapid technical advances over the past few years and no small amount of media hype, there are numerous theoretical and practical problems yet to be solved before virtual reality can catch up with our imaginations and make good on these promises. Locomotion is one of the most significant interaction challenges in VR because body movement is constrained by the real world, and users may collide with walls or physical obstacles if they attempt to walk outside the boundaries of a "room-scale" space. In this talk, I will present a series of illusory techniques that imperceptibly manipulate the laws of physics to overcome the spatial limitations that normally restrict movement in the virtual world. This approach, know as redirected walking, has stunning potential to fool the senses. I will discuss empirical experiments that have convinced users they were walking along a straight path while actually traveling in a circle, or that they were exploring impossibly large virtual environments within the footprint of a single real-world room. Additionally, I will discuss technical challenges for developing redirected walking systems and present novel algorithms that can automatically redirect users in complex physical spaces with obstacles.
Making Small Spaces Feel Large: Practical Illusions in Virtual Reality with Evan Suma Rosenberg
Over the next decade, immersive technologies have the potential to revolutionize how people communicate over distance, how they learn, train, and operate in challenging physical environments, and how they visualize, understand, and make decisions based on an ever-growing landscape of complex data. However, despite rapid technical advances over the past few years and no small amount of media hype, there are numerous theoretical and practical problems yet to be solved before virtual reality can catch up with our imaginations and make good on these promises. Locomotion is one of the most significant interaction challenges in VR because body movement is constrained by the real world, and users may collide with walls or physical obstacles if they attempt to walk outside the boundaries of a "room-scale" space. In this talk, I will present a series of illusory techniques that imperceptibly manipulate the laws of physics to overcome the spatial limitations that normally restrict movement in the virtual world. This approach, know as redirected walking, has stunning potential to fool the senses. I will discuss empirical experiments that have convinced users they were walking along a straight path while actually traveling in a circle, or that they were exploring impossibly large virtual environments within the footprint of a single real-world room. Additionally, I will discuss technical challenges for developing redirected walking systems and present novel algorithms that can automatically redirect users in complex physical spaces with obstacles.
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