Managing real world and virtual motion

A US Patent was issued for the technology presented in the IEEE Access journal and the ACM SIGGRAPH poster on redirected walking by Yashas Joshi and Charalambos Poullis.

Abstract Navigation of a virtual environment (VE) can mean navigating a VE that is spatially larger than the available Physical Tracked Space (PTS). Accordingly, the concept of redirected walking was introduced in order to provide a more natural way of navigating a VE, albeit with many restrictions on the shape and size of the physical and virtual spaces. However, prior art techniques have limitations such as negatively impacting the sense of immersion of the user, motion sickness, or forcing the user to look away by stimulating major saccades. Accordingly, the inventors have established a novel technique which overcomes these limitations. The technique is based on the psychological phenomenon of inattentional blindness allowing for re-directed walking without requiring the triggering major saccades in the users, complex expensive systems, etc.