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Abstract

When walking in Virtual Environments, ‘Redirected Walking' is often used to extend the
virtual walking range beyond the physical borders of the tracking system. To investigate
the effect of walking speed on curve sensitivity, an experiment was conducted in which
the participants walked on curved paths at different walking speeds and gave response of
which direction they have walked on a curve. An effect of lowered detection thresholds of
curvature has been found for the slower walking speed.
Another possible way to redirect users could be to use avatars in order to exploit collision-
avoiding behaviour as it is applied by humans in everyday life when passing people. To
evaluate these effects, we first had to develop a free-walking controller for redirected
walking and extend it by adding avatars as distractors. A dynamic curvature controller
(speed as a parameter) and avatar controller were evaluated in a further experiment
which showed significant improvements for dynamic curvature adjustment. Furthermore we gained insight into how to use avatars as distracters for improving redirected walking.