Generation of Turning Walking Sensation by a Vestibular Display

This paper describes a new method to generate turning walking sensation by vestibular stimulation with initial (bias) inclination of the motion seat. Our vestibular display can move a seat in 3 degree-of-freedom: lifting, roll and pitch rotation. All of these motions are important for generating walking sensation. We investigated the intensity of turning sensation (i.e. sensation of self-direction changing), and the sensation of straight walking and left/right-turning walking with different conditions of initial roll angle. The result of the user study showed that our method could generate turning walking sensation at about 44 to 52 % and straight walking 57 % of real walking.