Flexible and general redirected walking for head-mounted displays

Traditional head-mounted display (HMD) locomotion interfaces map real world movements into an equivalent virtual world movement. Therefore, people cannot naturally explore a virtual world that is larger than the real world space. Joysticks, treadmills, redirected walking, and other techniques have been proposed by others to relax this restriction. In this work, we propose a new “general redirected walking” interface which works with arbitrary shaped and sized real worlds and virtual worlds by injecting dynamic translation or rotation gains into virtual world and steering a user to walk along a best direction in the real world identified by three heuristics in real time. We tested our algorithm with 10 virtual world models and 5 real-world (i.e., tracking system) models using software designed to simulate a user walking on a random path. We have also developed a prototype implementation for our HMD system.