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Realistic walking experience for system-automated virtual reality tour

  • Track 4: Digital Games, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality
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Abstract

Walking through a virtual environment is significant in many virtual reality applications. To provide a realistic walking experience, researchers have developed many virtual locomotion techniques where users provide constant input for walking. Usually, the user’s continuous input is mapped with the visual stimulus to make the user experience walking in the virtual environment. However, system-automated virtual tours allow the users to navigate in the virtual environment without any continuous input for travelling, leaving no room for mapping user input with walking. Due to its low interaction fidelity, it is less preferred to implement realistic walking for a system-automated tour. In order to improve the walking realism (visually), in this work, we have proposed an instantaneous walking speed prediction model for a system-automated tour. We built and validated the model by collecting walking data from 40 users. The model was then evaluated with the help of an empirical study (N = 34). We found that using the speed predicted by the model as the visual optic flow can enhance the realistic walking experience than using a constant average walking speed. This work may motivate the developers and researchers to incorporate realistic walking experiences on a system-automated virtual tour.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgments

We sincerely wish to thank the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India, for supporting this work. Also, we would like to thank all the participants who volunteered for the empirical studies.

Funding

This work was supported by Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India (Grant Number: DST/ICPS/IHDS/2018 (General) Dt: 13.03.2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, 100190, Assam, India

    Nilotpal Biswas, Debangshu Banerjee & Samit Bhattacharya

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  1. Nilotpal Biswas
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  2. Debangshu Banerjee
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  3. Samit Bhattacharya
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Correspondence to Nilotpal Biswas.

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Biswas, N., Banerjee, D. & Bhattacharya, S. Realistic walking experience for system-automated virtual reality tour. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 17453–17470 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-14035-z

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