Individual differences and impact of gender on curvature redirection thresholds

Abstract

To enable real walking in a virtual environment (VE) that is larger than the available physical space, redirection techniques that introduce multisensory conflicts between visual and nonvisual cues to manipulate different aspects of a user's trajectory could be applied. When applied within certain thresholds, these manipulations could go unnoticed and immersion remains intact. Research effort has been spent on identifying these thresholds and a wide range of thresholds was reported in different studies. These differences in thresholds could be explained by many factors such as individual differences, walking speed, or context settings such as environment design, cognitive load, distractors, etc. In this paper, we present a study to investigate the role of gender on curvature redirection thresholds (RDTs) using the maximum likelihood procedure with the classical two-alternative force choice task. Results show high variability in individuals' RDTs, and that on average women have higher curvature RDTs than men. Furthermore, results also confirm existing findings about the negative correlation between walking speed and curvature RDTs.