668 research outputs found
Substitutional reality:using the physical environment to design virtual reality experiences
Experiencing Virtual Reality in domestic and other uncontrolled settings is challenging due to the presence of physical objects and furniture that are not usually defined in the Virtual Environment. To address this challenge, we explore the concept of Substitutional Reality in the context of Virtual Reality: a class of Virtual Environments where every physical object surrounding a user is paired, with some degree of discrepancy, to a virtual counterpart. We present a model of potential substitutions and validate it in two user studies. In the first study we investigated factors that affect participants' suspension of disbelief and ease of use. We systematically altered the virtual representation of a physical object and recorded responses from 20 participants. The second study investigated users' levels of engagement as the physical proxy for a virtual object varied. From the results, we derive a set of guidelines for the design of future Substitutional Reality experiences
MetaSpace II: Object and full-body tracking for interaction and navigation in social VR
MetaSpace II (MS2) is a social Virtual Reality (VR) system where multiple
users can not only see and hear but also interact with each other, grasp and
manipulate objects, walk around in space, and get tactile feedback. MS2 allows
walking in physical space by tracking each user's skeleton in real-time and
allows users to feel by employing passive haptics i.e., when users touch or
manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or
manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. To enable these
elements in VR, MS2 creates a correspondence in spatial layout and object
placement by building the virtual world on top of a 3D scan of the real world.
Through the association between the real and virtual world, users are able to
walk freely while wearing a head-mounted device, avoid obstacles like walls and
furniture, and interact with people and objects. Most current virtual reality
(VR) environments are designed for a single user experience where interactions
with virtual objects are mediated by hand-held input devices or hand gestures.
Additionally, users are only shown a representation of their hands in VR
floating in front of the camera as seen from a first person perspective. We
believe, representing each user as a full-body avatar that is controlled by
natural movements of the person in the real world (see Figure 1d), can greatly
enhance believability and a user's sense immersion in VR.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Video:
http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/metaspace-ii
Inattentional Blindness for Redirected Walking Using Dynamic Foveated Rendering
Redirected walking is a Virtual Reality(VR) locomotion technique which
enables users to navigate virtual environments (VEs) that are spatially larger
than the available physical tracked space. In this work we present a novel
technique for redirected walking in VR based on the psychological phenomenon of
inattentional blindness. Based on the user's visual fixation points we divide
the user's view into zones. Spatially-varying rotations are applied according
to the zone's importance and are rendered using foveated rendering. Our
technique is real-time and applicable to small and large physical spaces.
Furthermore, the proposed technique does not require the use of stimulated
saccades but rather takes advantage of naturally occurring saccades and blinks
for a complete refresh of the framebuffer. We performed extensive testing and
present the analysis of the results of three user studies conducted for the
evaluation
Redirected Walking in Infinite Virtual Indoor Environment Using Change-blindness
We present a change-blindness based redirected walking algorithm that allows
a user to explore on foot a virtual indoor environment consisting of an
infinite number of rooms while at the same time ensuring collision-free walking
for the user in real space. This method uses change blindness to scale and
translate the room without the user's awareness by moving the wall while the
user is not looking. Consequently, the virtual room containing the current user
always exists in the valid real space. We measured the detection threshold for
whether the user recognizes the movement of the wall outside the field of view.
Then, we used the measured detection threshold to determine the amount of
changing the dimension of the room by moving that wall. We conducted a
live-user experiment to navigate the same virtual environment using the
proposed method and other existing methods. As a result, users reported higher
usability, presence, and immersion when using the proposed method while showing
reduced motion sickness compared to other methods. Hence, our approach can be
used to implement applications to allow users to explore an infinitely large
virtual indoor environment such as virtual museum and virtual model house while
simultaneously walking in a small real space, giving users a more realistic
experience.Comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ZKavhXxd
Real walking in virtual environments for factory planning and evaluation
Nowadays, buildings or production facilities are designed using specialized design software and building information modeling tools help to evaluate the resulting virtual mock-up. However, with current, primarily desktop based tools it is hard to evaluate human factors of such a design, for instance spatial constraints for workforces. This paper presents a new tool for factory planning and evaluation based on virtual reality that allows designers, planning experts, and workforces to walk naturally and freely within a virtual factory. Therefore, designs can be checked as if they were real before anything is built.ISSN:2212-827
ARC: Alignment-based Redirection Controller for Redirected Walking in Complex Environments
We present a novel redirected walking controller based on alignment that
allows the user to explore large and complex virtual environments, while
minimizing the number of collisions with obstacles in the physical environment.
Our alignment-based redirection controller, ARC, steers the user such that
their proximity to obstacles in the physical environment matches the proximity
to obstacles in the virtual environment as closely as possible. To quantify a
controller's performance in complex environments, we introduce a new metric,
Complexity Ratio (CR), to measure the relative environment complexity and
characterize the difference in navigational complexity between the physical and
virtual environments. Through extensive simulation-based experiments, we show
that ARC significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art controllers in its
ability to steer the user on a collision-free path. We also show through
quantitative and qualitative measures of performance that our controller is
robust in complex environments with many obstacles. Our method is applicable to
arbitrary environments and operates without any user input or parameter
tweaking, aside from the layout of the environments. We have implemented our
algorithm on the Oculus Quest head-mounted display and evaluated its
performance in environments with varying complexity. Our project website is
available at https://gamma.umd.edu/arc/
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