The objective of the system presented in this paper is to give users tactile feedback while walking in a virtual world through an anthropomorphic finger motion interface. We determined that the synchrony between the first person perspective and proprioceptive information together with the motor activity of the user's fingers are able to induce an illusionary feeling that is equivalent to the sense of ownership of the invisible avatar's legs. Under this condition, the perception of the ground under the virtual avatar's foot is felt through the user's fingertip. The experiments indicated that using our method the scale of the tactile perception of the texture roughness was extended and that the enlargement ratio was proportional to the avatar's body (foot) size. In order to display the target tactile perception to the users, we have to control only the virtual avatar's body (foot) size and the roughness of the tactile texture. Our results suggest that in terms of tactile perception fingers can be a replacement for legs in locomotion interfaces.
Instead of simulating full-body locomotion, several interaction techniques using a full-body metaphor were presented. The Walking-in-Place technique @cite_2 avoids the user being relocated in the real world. The user walks by utilizing walk-like gestures instead of actually walking. The Step WIM technique @cite_21 allows the user to interact with VEs through a hand-held miniature copy of the scene. Other techniques that transform the VE or user's motion by rotation or scaling include redirected walking @cite_6 , scaled-translational-gain @cite_17 @cite_9 , seven-league-boots @cite_10 , and motion compression @cite_24 . Generally, these metaphor techniques are lacking in terms of kinesthetic feedback.
@cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_2 @cite_10 @cite_17
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This paper presents a set of interaction techniques for hands-free multi-scale navigation through virtual environments. We believe that hands-free navigation, unlike the majority of navigation techniques based on hand motions, has the greatest potential for maximizing the interactivity of virtual environments since navigation modes are offloaded from modal hand gestures to more direct motions of the feet and torso. Not only are the users’ hands freed to perform tasks such as modeling, notetaking and object manipulation, but we also believe that foot and torso movements may inherently be more natural for some navigation tasks. The particular interactions that we developed include a leaning technique for moving small and medium distances, a foot-gesture controlled Step WIM that acts as a floor map for moving larger distances, and a viewing technique that enables a user to view a full 360 degrees in only a three-walled semi-immersive environment by subtly amplifying the mapping between their torso rotation and the virtual world. We formatively designed and evaluated our techniques in existing projects related to archaeological reconstructions, free-form modeling, and interior design. In each case, our informal observations have indicated that motions such as walking and leaning are both appropriate for navigation and are effective in cognitively simplifying complex virtual environment interactions since functionality is more evenly distributed across the body. This paper describes a method for allowing people to virtually move around a CAVE™ without ever having to turn to face the missing back wall. We describe the method, and report a pilot study of 28 participants, half of whom moved through the virtual world using a hand-held controller, and the other half used the new technique called 'Redirected Walking in Place' (RWP). The results show that the current instantiation of the RWP technique does not result in a lower frequency of looking towards the missing wall. However, the results also show that the sense of presence in the virtual environment is significantly and negatively correlated with the amount that the back wall is seen. There is evidence that RWP does reduce the chance of seeing the blank wall for some participants. The increased sense of presence through never having to face the blank wall, and the results of this pilot study show the RWP has promise and merits further development. Telepresent walking allows visits to remote places such as museums, exhibitions, architecture, or industrial sites with a high degree of realism. While walking freely around in the user environment, the user sees the remote environment through the "eyes" of a remote mobile teleoperator. For that purpose, the user's motion is tracked and transferred to the teleoperator. Without additional processing of the motion data, the size of the remote environment to be explored is limited to the size of the user environment. This paper proposes an extension of telepresent walking to arbitrarily large remote or virtual spaces based on compressing wide-area motion into the available user space. Motion compression is a novel approach and does not make use of scaling or walking-in-place metaphors. Rather, motion compression introduces some deviation of curvature between user motion and teleoperator motion. An optimization approach is used to find the user path of minimum curvature deviation with respect to a given predicted teleoperator path that fits inside the boundaries of the user environment. Turning angles and travel distances are mapped with a 1:1 ratio to provide the desired impression of realistic self-locomotion in the teleoperator's environment. The effects of the curvature deviation on inconsistent perception of locomotion are studied in two experiments. This article presents an interactive technique for moving through an immersive virtual environment (or “virtual reality”). The technique is suitable for applications where locomotion is restricted to ground level. The technique is derived from the idea that presence in virtual environments may be enhanced the stronger the match between proprioceptive information from human body movements and sensory feedback from the computer-generated displays. The technique is an attempt to simulate body movements associated with walking. The participant “walks in place” to move through the virtual environment across distances greater than the physical limitations imposed by the electromagnetic tracking devices. A neural network is used to analyze the stream of coordinates from the head-mounted display, to determine whether or not the participant is walking on the spot. Whenever it determines the walking behavior, the participant is moved through virtual space in the direction of his or her gaze. We discuss two experimental studies to assess the impact on presence of this method in comparison to the usual hand-pointing method of navigation in virtual reality. The studies suggest that subjective rating of presence is enhanced by the walking method provided that participants associate subjectively with the virtual body provided in the environment. An application of the technique to climbing steps and ladders is also presented. When an immersive virtual environment represents a space that is larger than the available space within which a user can travel by directly walking, it becomes necessary to consider alternative methods for traveling through that space. The traditional solution is to require the user to travel 'indirectly', using a device that changes his viewpoint in the environment without actually requiring him to move - for example, a joystick. However, other solutions involving variations on direct walking are also possible. In this paper, we present a new metaphor for natural, augmented direct locomotion through moderately large-scale immersive virtual environments (IVEs) presented via head mounted display systems, which we call seven league boots. The key characteristic of this method is that it involves determining a user's intended direction of travel and then augmenting only the component of his or her motion that is aligned with that direction. After reviewing previously proposed methods for enabling intuitive locomotion through large IVEs, we begin by describing the technical implementation details of our novel method, discussing the various alternative options that we explored and parameters that we varied in an attempt to attain optimal performance. We then present the results of a pilot observer experiment that we conducted in an attempt to obtain objective, qualitative insight into the relative strengths and weaknesses of our new method, in comparison to the three most commonly used alternative locomotion methods: flying, via use of a wand; normal walking, with a uniform gain applied to the output of the tracker; and normal walking without gain, but with the location and orientation of the larger virtual environment periodically adjusted relative to position of the participant in the real environment. In this study we found, among other things, that for travel down a long, straight virtual hallway, participants overwhelmingly preferred the seven league boots method to the other methods, overall Navigating through large virtual environments using a head-mounted display (HMD) is difficult due to the spatial limitations of the tracking system. We conducted two experiments to examine methods of exploring large virtual spaces with an HMD under translation conditions different than normal walking. Experiment 1 compares locomotion in the virtual environment using two different motor actions to translate the subject. The study contrasts user learning and orientation of two different translational gains of bipedal locomotion (not scaled and scaled by ten) with joystick locomotion, where rotation in both locomotion interfaces is accomplished by physically turning. Experiment 2 looks further at the effects of increasing the translational gain of bipedal locomotion in a virtual environment. A subject's spatial learning and orientation were evaluated in three gain conditions where each physical step was: not scaled, scaled by two, or scaled by ten (1:1, 2:1, 10:1, respectively). A sub-study of this experiment compared the performance of people who played video games against people who did not.