Redirected Walking for Virtual Environments: Investigation and Evaluation

Redirected walking (RDW) is a significant technique to tackle the problem of limited physical space in the process of creating and experiencing an immersive virtual environment (VE). The classification and description of the RDW methods in the existing literature are biased toward the core concept, and the available evaluation system does not comprehensively consider the subjective and objective indicators. It is arduous to effectively guide the selection of solutions for practical development. This work classifies and compares the mainstream RDW technologies in virtual reality based on whether there exists a walking boundary in a VE. Four metrics from both objective and subjective aspects were selected including mean walking speed, mean reset distance, motion fidelity, and motion sickness index. An evaluation system was established based on a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, and five groups of live user experiments were conducted to evaluate the representative RDW schemes. Sub-results analyzed the advantages and drawbacks of the RDW methods at both objective and subjective levels. Comprehensive results allowed for more intuitive outcomes that are hardly attainable with a single factor.