Walking in Virtual Reality: Flexible Spaces and Other Techniques

In many virtual reality applications the virtual world is larger than the available physical workspace. Multiple mechanical solutions have been developed to support the exploration of large virtual environments. However, real walking is still the most immersive way of supporting locomotion in a virtual environment. Redirected walking techniques enable natural locomotion through large scale virtual worlds. In this chapter we briefly discuss some of the existing interfaces for walking and focus on existing approaches for redirected walking. We will concentrate specifically on spatial manipulation techniques and introduce a novel approach for their use—flexible spaces. This is a novel redirection technique that enables infinite real walking in virtual environments that do not require the replication of real world layouts. This approach allows designers of virtual environments to focus on the content of the virtual world independently of the implementation details imposed by real walking, thereby making spatial manipulation techniques more practical for use in a variety of application domains.