How Realistically Can We Walk in a Virtual Reality Model? Empirical Study: Fid-Bau Portal

How Realistically Can We Walk in a Virtual Reality Model? Empirical Study

Kang, Julian / Yadav, Neeraj

The omni-directional treadmill, recently used in 3D computer games, facilitates users to walk indefinitely in a virtual world. This gives an opportunity to overcome the shortcomings of virtual reality rooms where the user can only move within a limited range. The omni-directional treadmill interprets the user's foot movement on a low fiction plate as a user walking. But since this cannot actually be the same as walking, we wonder how accurately the omni-directional treadmill can simulate our walking in a virtual world. This paper introduces our experiment in assessing how people perceive distance in a virtual world when they are walking through a 3D computer model using the omni-directional treadmill. We asked the participants to walk a certain distance in the virtual world using the omni-directional treadmill, and measured how accurately they performed our request. In our experiments, participants who were asked to walk a certain distance in the virtual world made four times more errors than when they walked in the real world. This paper presents how we performed the experiment and what we learned from it.