Velocity-dependent curvature gain and avatar use for Redirected Walking

We investigated in a study whether humans’ sensitivity to curved walking is affected by their walking velocity. Amongst other techniques, redirecting users of an immersive virtual environment on a curved path is part of the so-called ’Redirected Walking’. We conducted an experiment in which 12 participants walked specific curvatures at given speeds in a VR. We found that people are significantly less sensitive to walking on a curve when walking slower. Moreover, we assume the possibility of using avatars to support redirection algorithms as it was shown by Llobera et al. ([LSRS10]) that proxemics holds true for avatars in virtual environments, too. In this work, we depict three possible applications of how avatars could be used to achieve a better redirection.