User-centered redirected walking and resetting with virtual feelers

With redirected walking (RDW), the exploration of an infinite virtual world with a small physical space has been enabled. This paper proposes a user-centered RDW (UC-RDW) and user-centered resetting (UC-R) that incorporates virtual feelers. This method performs redirection and resetting by only considering a user and obstacles. This means that the UC-RDW and UC-R perform redirection without complex prediction/optimization. If the virtual feelers collide with obstacle, the method redirects the user in the opposite direction from the obstacle. The following simulations obtained one condition (diamond-shaped with area ratio of 0.9, 1.0, and 1.2, angle between feelers of 10, and a length ratio of 0.5 between the major and minor axes of the diamond shape) that yields the best performance under various ray conditions. Then, the performance of the UC-RDW and UC-R were verified through live user experiments. Consequently, a lesser 10-m reset number, lesser increase in total simulator-sickness score, and shorter time to walk 10 m were obtained with the UC-RDW and UC-R. Furthermore, participants who were redirected through the UC-RDW and UC-R applied a larger redirection than other methods and stayed closer to the center of the tracked space than those using other methods. In addition, UC-RDW showed comparable performance to APF-RDW in medium and large-tracked space. Future works include verification of the UC-RDW and UC-R using a tracked space of irregular shape and multiple users.