Object Manipulation in Virtual Reality Under Increasing Levels of Translational Gain

Room-scale Virtual Reality (VR) has become an affordable consumer reality, with applications ranging from entertainment to productivity. However, the limited physical space available for room-scale VR in the typical home or office environment poses a significant problem. To solve this, physical spaces can be extended by amplifying the mapping of physical to virtual movement (translational gain). Although amplified movement has been used since the earliest days of VR, little is known about how it influences reach-based interactions with virtual objects, now a standard feature of consumer VR. Consequently, this paper explores the picking and placing of virtual objects in VR for the first time, with translational gains of between 1x (a one-to-one mapping of a 3.5m*3.5m virtual space to the same sized physical space) and 3x (10.5m*10.5m virtual mapped to 3.5m*3.5m physical). Results show that reaching accuracy is maintained for up to 2x gain, however going beyond this diminishes accuracy and increases simulator sickness and perceived workload. We suggest gain levels of 1.5x to 1.75x can be utilized without compromising the usability of a VR task, significantly expanding the bounds of interactive room-scale VR

Conformal redirected walking for shared indoor spaces

In this work we present a redirected walking scheme suitable for shared spaces in a virtual reality environment. We show our redirected walking to work for the case of two physical spaces (a host and a guest) being merged into a single virtual host space. The redirection is based on warping the guest space into the host space using a conformal mapping that preserves the local shape and features. We compare our technique with state-of-the art indoor redirection schemes and show its efficiency. We found our method to have better task performance, higher social presence, and less simulator sickness