Asymmetric Design Approach and Collision Avoidance Techniques For Room-scale Multiplayer Virtual Reality
Misha Sra · 2016
Recent advances in consumer virtual reality (VR) technology have made it easy to accurately capture users' motions over room-sized areas allowing natural locomotion for navigation in VR. While this helps create a stronger match between proprioceptive information from human body movements for enhancing immersion and reducing motion sickness, it introduces a few challenges. Walking is only possible within virtual environments (VEs) that fit inside the boundaries of the tracked physical space which for most users is quite small. Within this space the potential for colliding with physical objects around the play area is high. Additionally, only limited haptic feedback is available. In this paper, I focus on the problem of variations in the size and shape of each user's tracked physical space for multiplayer interactions. As part of the constrained physical space problem, I also present an automated system for steering the user away from play area boundaries using Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS). In my thesis, I will build techniques to enable the system to intelligently apply redirection and GVS-based steering as users explore virtual environments of arbitrary sizes.