Redirected Walking with Unplanned Paths

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Redirected Walking with Unplanned Paths

• Steven Damer

2
Introduction

• Virtual Worlds may be arbitrarily large. Tracked
  area is frequently limited.
• The solution is to gradually turn the
  environment, which causes the user to
  unconsciously turn in the real world.

3
Program Organization

• Path generating functions
• getpath(length,turnprob driftrate)
• getboundedpath(length,radius)
• Path distorting functions
• getdistort(speed, orientdelta, params)
• changepath(pos,speed,curorient,orientdelta,params)
  
• Utility functions
• getpathdelta(pos)
• showpath(speed,orientdelta,speeddelta,offsetdelta)

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Path Types

• Standard user walks in a more or less straight
  line, taking occasional 90 degree turns
• Bounded user walks to a succession of points on
  the boundary of a circle

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Path Distortion

• The path distortion algorithm attempts to direct
  the user to walk around the boundary of a circle
  whose radius is determined by the users
  sensitivity

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Sensitivity Estimates

• Arrived at by holding a piece of paper up to the
  screen
• Constant rate of turn - .049 radians per step.
• Turn distortion from 90 degrees to 150 degrees
  66

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Random Walk
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Frequent Turns
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Rare Turns
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Bounded
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Frequent Turns with drift
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Rare Turns with drift
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Effects of constant distortion
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Effects of turn distortion
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Aggregate results
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Conclusions

• Conclusions are based on very rough estimations
• Area needed seems large, but with sufficiently
  low user sensitivity, technique is practical
• Path generation technique does not make a
  significant difference

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Future Work

• Add speed distortion
• Alter the functionality of turn distortion
• Reduce the radius of the target circle
• Test algorithm on a HMD

18
References

• www.cs.unc.edu/eve/rdw
• Sharif Razzaque, Zachariah Kohn, Mary C. Whitton.
  (2001) Redirected Walking. Eurographics 2001
• Field, Tom and Vamplew, Peter (2004) Generalised
  Algorithms for Redirected Walking in Virtual
  Environments. In Proceedings AISAT2004
  International Conference on Artificial
  Intelligence in Science and Technology, pages
  58-63, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia