Postural Stability Analysis In Virtual Reality Using the HTC Vive

Postural stability is an important measure for many medical diseases such as Parkinson. In the last years, research focused on using inexpensive and portable devices to measure postural stability, while the visual targets were physical objects in the environment. Sensing balancing boards were used to measure stance forces, while movements of the upper body were not taken into account. Within this paper, postural stability was measured using the HTC Vive. A variation of a virtual fixation point's distance was analyzed and compared to a reference condition with closed eyes. It is shown that body sway in the VR conditions is increased in the anterior-posterior and decreased in the medial-lateral direction

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

Where are you going? Using human locomotion models for target estimation

ISSN:0178-2789ISSN:1432-231

Preliminary Environment Mapping for Redirected Walking

Redirected walking applications allow a user to explore large virtual environments in a smaller physical space by employing so-called redirection techniques. To further improve the immersion of a virtual experience, path planner algorithms were developed which choose redirection techniques based on the current position and orientation of the user. In order to ensure a reliable performance, planning algorithms depend on accurate position tracking using an external tracking system. However, the disadvantage of such a tracking method is the time-consuming preparation of the physical environment which renders the system immobile. A possible solution to eliminate this dependency is to replace the external tracking system with a state-of-the-art inside-out tracker based on the concept of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). In this paper, we present an approach in which we attach a commercially available SLAM device to a head-mounted display to track the head motion of a user. From sensor recordings of the device, we construct a map of the surrounding environment for future processing in an existing path planner for redirected walking