Unlimited Walking: One Small Step for a Man
Real walking provides the most basic and intuitive form of locomotion for humans, allowing effective exploration of most existing environments. Walking per se is a tremendous evolutional achievement, considering that more than 50 muscles or muscle groups
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Unlimited Walking: One Small Step for a Man
Real walking provides the most basic and intuitive form of locomotion for humans, allowing effective exploration of most existing environments. Walking per se is a tremendous evolutional achievement, considering that more than 50 muscles or muscle groups have to be temporally and spatially synchronized in the apparently simple task to shift weight from one foot to the other in a repetitive forward progression [1]. While continuously updating and balancing the high amount of instability in the locomotor system, humans collect and process information about their self-motion from a variety of senses, always validating external sensory information by setting them in relation to the stability of the overall system. The result is a highly accurate and sophisticated means for humans to explore nearly any environment. In fact, walking proved to be the preferred means of locomotion for humans in most known environments, as illustrated by men walking on the moon or the hopes to generate gravitation on space stations that will allow more natural means of moving (see Chap. 1). In the real world, we navigate with ease by walking, running, driving etc., but as explained in the previous chapter, a realistic simulation of these locomotion techniques is difficult to achieve in IVEs. In IVEs, users can control their virtual viewpoint by moving their tracked head and by walking through the real world. Usually, movements in the real world are mapped one-to-one to virtual camera motions. However, the size of the virtual world often differs from the size of the tracked laboratory space so that a straightforward implementation of omnidirectional and unlimited walking is not possible. With redirection techniques, the virtual camera is manipulated by applying gains to user motion so that the virtual world moves differently than the real world. With this approach users could walk through large-scale IVEs while physically remaining in a reasonably small workspace. This chapter presents a series of experiments in which we have quantified how much humans can be redirected without observing inconsistencies between real and virtual motions. We performed
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 F. Steinicke, Being Really Virtual, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43078-2_5
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5 Unlimited Walking: One Small Step for a Man
three psychophysical studies in which subjects had to discriminate between real and virtual motions, in particular, rotations, translations, and walking directions. Details about the different experiments can be found in [1–5].
5.1 Locomotion in Virtual Environments While moving in the real world, sensory information such as vestibular, proprioceptive, and efferent copy signals as well as visual information create consistent multisensory cues that indicate one’s own motion, i.e., acceleration, speed and direction of travel. In this context walking is the most basic and intuitive way of moving within the real world. Keeping such an active and dynamic ability to navigate throug
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