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Walking in Virtual Reality: Flexible Spaces and Other Techniques

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The Visual Language of Technique

Abstract

In many virtual reality applications the virtual world is larger than the available physical workspace. Multiple mechanical solutions have been developed to support the exploration of large virtual environments. However, real walking is still the most immersive way of supporting locomotion in a virtual environment. Redirected walking techniques enable natural locomotion through large scale virtual worlds. In this chapter we briefly discuss some of the existing interfaces for walking and focus on existing approaches for redirected walking. We will concentrate specifically on spatial manipulation techniques and introduce a novel approach for their use—flexible spaces. This is a novel redirection technique that enables infinite real walking in virtual environments that do not require the replication of real world layouts. This approach allows designers of virtual environments to focus on the content of the virtual world independently of the implementation details imposed by real walking, thereby making spatial manipulation techniques more practical for use in a variety of application domains.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the Vienna PhD School of Informatics and USC Institute for Creative Technologies under W91 1NF-04-D-0005. The authors thank Evan Suma, Mark Bolas, Adam Jones, and Thai Phan from the USC ICT Mixed Reality Lab for their support during the initial development of flexible spaces.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Faculty of Informatics, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Khrystyna Vasylevska, Iana Podkosova & Hannes Kaufmann

Authors
  1. Khrystyna Vasylevska
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  2. Iana Podkosova
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  3. Hannes Kaufmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Khrystyna Vasylevska .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Architecture and Urban Studies (DASTU) Campus Leonardo - Building La Nave, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Milano, Italy

    Luigi Cocchiarella

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Vasylevska, K., Podkosova, I., Kaufmann, H. (2015). Walking in Virtual Reality: Flexible Spaces and Other Techniques. In: Cocchiarella, L. (eds) The Visual Language of Technique. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05341-7_7

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