A User Guidance Approach for Passive Haptic Environments

Abstract

Traveling through virtual environments (VEs) by means of real walking is a challenging task since usually the size of the virtual world exceeds the size of the tracked interaction space. Redirected walking is one concept to solve this problem by guiding the user on a physical path which differs from the path the user visually perceives, for example, in head-mounted display (HMD) environments.The user can be redirected to certain locations in the physical space, in particular to real proxy objects which provide passive feedback. In such passive haptic environments, any number of virtual objects can be mapped to proxy objects having similar haptic properties, i. e., size, shape and texture. When the user is guided to corresponding proxy objects, s/he can sense virtual objects by touching their real world counterparts. Therefore it is vital to predict the user's movements in the virtual world in order to recognize the target location. Based on the prediction a transformed path can be determined in the physical space on which the user is guided to the desired proxy object. In this paper we present concepts how a user's path can be predicted reliably and how a corresponding path to a desired proxy object can be derived on which the user does not observe inconsistencies between vision and proprioception.