Humans Have Difficulty Walking in a Straight Line

We Cannot Walk in Straight Lines- Virtual Reality Takes Advantage!

Joshua | August 25, 2015

This might sound a bit surprising but we humans are unable to walk in straight lines. A blindfolded man will walk around in circles. However, virtual reality is taking advantage of this inability. Subtle visual cues will trick us in thinking that we have travelled a huge area when actually we have not even left the room. This process is called redirected walking.

A VR study at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC. The antennas have LEDs for tracking. Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-lineand-thats-great-vr/

<more at http://www.augmentedrealitytrends.com/virtual-reality/cant-walk-straight-line.html; related links: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-walk-straight-lineand-thats-great-vr/ (You Can't Walk in a Straight Line -- and That's Great for VR. August 21, 2015) and http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.132.4818 (Redirected Walking. Sharif Razzaque , Zachariah Kohn , Mary C. Whitton. [Abstract: Redirected Walking, a new interactive locomotion technique for virtual environments (VEs), captures the benefits of real walking while extending the possible size of the VE. Real walking, although natural and producing a high subjective sense of presence, limits virtual environments to the size of the tracked space. Redirected Walking addresses this limitation by interactively and imperceptibly rotating the virtual scene about the user. The rotation causes the user to walk continually toward the furthest wall of the lab without noticing the rotation. We implemented the technique using stereo graphics and 3D spatialized audio. Observations during a pilot study suggest that the technique works: Redirected Walking causes people to change their real walking direction without noticing it, allows for larger VEs, and does not induce appreciable simulator sickness.]>