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

Factors influencing visual attention switch in multi-display user interfaces: a survey

Multi-display User Interfaces (MDUIs) enable people to take advantage of the different characteristics of different display categories. For example, combining mobile and large displays within the same system enables users to interact with user interface elements locally while simultaneously having a large display space to show data. Although there is a large potential gain in performance and comfort, there is at least one main drawback that can override the benefits of MDUIs: the visual and physical separation between displays requires that users perform visual attention switches between displays. In this paper, we present a survey and analysis of existing data and classifications to identify factors that can affect visual attention switch in MDUIs. Our analysis and taxonomy bring attention to the often ignored implications of visual attention switch and collect existing evidence to facilitate research and implementation of effective MDUIs.Postprin

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/

NaviFields: relevance fields for adaptive VR navigation

Virtual Reality allow users to explore virtual environments naturally, by moving their head and body. However, the size of the environments they can explore is limited by real world constraints, such as the tracking technology or the physical space available. Existing techniques removing these limitations often break the metaphor of natural navigation in VR (e.g. steering techniques), involve control commands (e.g., teleporting) or hinder precise navigation (e.g., scaling user's displacements). This paper proposes NaviFields, which quantify the requirements for precise navigation of each point of the environment, allowing natural navigation within relevant areas, while scaling users' displacements when travelling across non-relevant spaces. This expands the size of the navigable space, retains the natural navigation metaphor and still allows for areas with precise control of the virtual head. We present a formal description of our NaviFields technique, which we compared against two alternative solutions (i.e., homogeneous scaling and natural navigation). Our results demonstrate our ability to cover larger spaces, introduce minimal disruption when travelling across bigger distances and improve very significantly the precise control of the viewpoint inside relevant areas

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