The redirected walking toolkit: a unified development platform for exploring large virtual environments
Mahdi Azmandian, Timofey Y. Grechkin, Mark T. Bolas, Evan A. Suma · 2016
With the imminent emergence of low-cost tracking solutions, everyday VR users will soon experience the enhanced immersion of natural walking. Even with consumer-grade room-scale tracking, exploring large virtual environments can be made possible using a software solution known as redirected walking. Wide adoption of this technique has been hindered by the complexity and subtleties involved in successfully deploying redirection. To address this matter, we introduce the Redirected Walking Toolkit, to serve as a unified platform for developing, benchmarking, and deploying redirected walking algorithms. Our design enables seamless integration with standard virtual reality configurations, requiring minimal setup effort for content developers. The toolkit's flexible architecture offers an interface that is not only easy to extend, but also complimented with a suite of simulation tools for testing and analysis. We envision the Redirected Walking Toolkit to be a common testbed for VR researchers as well as a publicly-available tool for large virtual exploration in virtual reality applications.