“Ready Player One”: Enhancing Omnidirectional Treadmills for Use in Virtual Environments
A. Barberis, Trystan Bennet, Meredith E. Minear · 2019
As large-scale immersive virtual environments become more common, technologies develop to allow increasingly naturalistic travel in these spaces. One such technology, is the omnidirectional treadmill. Though the hardware has been realized, it still lacks a concrete software paradigm that ensures comfort and performance for the user. We identified three potentially key settings for omnidirectional treadmill locomotion in virtual reality (VR) environments that may lead to more comfort, increased degrees of freedom, and better performance: movement speed, treadmill sensor sensitivity, and decoupling the head's rotation from that of the body. To integrate these settings, we developed an original first-person movement script and conducted a prestudy to discover if enough variance between individuals existed to necessitate calibration on a per-individual basis. Initial prestudy results suggest that these three values do show enough variance to recommend they be calibrated on a per-individual basis and opens up the opportunity for further research into the potential benefits of these variables on locomotion in environments that use omnidirectional treadmills.