Researches from Stony Brook University, NVIDIA, and Adobe have devised a system which hides so-called ‘redirected walking’ techniques using saccades, natural eye movements which act like a momentary blindspot. Redirected walking changes the direction that a user is walking to create the illusion of moving through a larger virtual space than the physical space would allow.
At NVIDIA’s GTC 2018 conference this week, researchers Anjul Patney and Qi Sun presented their saccade-driven redirected walking system for dynamic room-scale VR. Redirected walking uses novel techniques to steer users in VR away from real-world obstacles like walls, with the goal of creating the illusion of traversing a larger space than is actually available to the user.
There’s a number of ways to implement redirected walking, but the strengths of this saccade-driven method is that it’s hidden from the user, widely applicable to VR content, and dynamic, allowing the system to direct users away from objects newly introduced into the environment, and even moving objects, the researchers say.
The basic principle behind their work is an exploitation of a natural quirk of human vision—saccadic suppression—to hide small rotations to the virtual scene. Saccades are quick eye movements which happen when we move our gaze from one part of a scene to another. Instead of moving in a slow continuous motion from one gaze point to the next, our eyes quickly dart about, when not tracking a moving object or focused on a singular point, a process which takes tens of milliseconds.
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Source: Road To VR