Effects of User’s Gaze on the Unintended Positional Drift in Walk-in-Place

Walk-In-Place (WIP) is a technique in which users perform walking or jogging-like movements in a stationary place to move around in virtual environments (VEs). However, unintended positional drift (UPD) while performing WIP often occurs, thus weakening its benefits of keeping users in a fixed position in a physical space. In this paper, we present our preliminary study exploring whether users’ gaze while WIP affects the direction of the UPD. Participants of the study jogged in a VE five times. Each time, we manipulated their gaze direction by displaying visual information in 5 different locations in their view. Although a correlation between the gaze and UPD direction was not found, we report the results from this study, including the amount of observed drift and preferred location of visual information, and discuss future research directions.