Improving redirection with dynamic reorientations and gains

Abstract

In head-mounted display systems, the confined size of the tracked space limits users from navigating larger virtual environments than the tracked physical space. Previous work suggests this constraint could be broken by asking users to back up or turn 180°whenever they encouter a wall in the real world [Williams et al. 2007]. In this work, we propose that the reorientation rate can be dynamically determined based on the user's instantaneous positional information and the shape of the navigable virtual space around the user. We conducted an experiment to compare our proposed dynamic reorientations with the previous Freeze-Turn reorientation. The results show that, with dynamic reorientations, participants walked a significantly longer distance between orientations than with Freeze-Turn reorientations.