Physical Space Requirements for Redirected Walking: How Size and Shape Affect Performance

Abstract

Redirected walking provides a compelling solution to explore large virtual environments in a natural way. However, research literature provides few guidelines regarding trade-offs involved in selecting size and layout for physical tracked space. We designed a rigorously controlled benchmarking framework and conducted two simulated user experiments to systematically investigate how the total area and dimensions of the tracked space affect performance of steer-to-center and steer-to-orbit algorithms. The results indicate that minimum viable size of physical tracked space for these redirected walking algorithms is approximately 6m 6m with performance continuously improving in larger tracked spaces. At the same time, no ''optimal'' tracked space size can guarantee the absence of contacts with the boundary. We also found that square tracked spaces enabled best overall performance with steer-to-center algorithm also performing well in moderately elongated rectangular spaces. Finally, we demonstrate that introducing translation gains can provide a useful boost in performance, particularly when physical space is constrained. We conclude with the discussion of potential applications of our benchmarking toolkit to other problems related to performance of redirected walking platforms.