The effects of spatial configuration on relative translation gain thresholds in redirected walking

Abstract

In this study, we explore how spatial configurations can be reflected in determining the threshold range of Relative Translation Gains (RTGs), a translation gain-based Redirected Walking (RDW) technique that scales the user’s movement in Virtual Reality (VR) in different ratios for width and depth. While previous works have shown that various cognitive factors influence the RDW threshold, studies investigating the impact of environmental aspects on the RDW threshold with regard to the user’s visual perception were lacking. Therefore, we examined the effect of spatial configurations on the RTG threshold by analyzing the participant’s responses and gaze distribution data in two user studies. The first study concerned the size of the virtual room and the existence of objects within it, and the second study focused on the combined impact of room size and spatial layout. Our results show that room size, the existence of objects, and spatial layout all significantly affect the RTG threshold range. Based on our findings, we propose virtual space rescaling guidelines to increase the range of adjustable movable space with RTGs for developers: placing distractors in the room, setting the perceived movable space to be larger than the adjusted movable space for an empty room, and avoiding the placement of object clusters in the center of the room. Our findings can be used to adaptively rescale VR users’ space according to the target virtual space’s configuration with a unified coordinate system that enables the utilization of physical objects in a virtual scene. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.