Walking Without Moving: An exploration of factors influencing the perceived naturalness of Walking-in-Place techniques for locomotion in virtual environments

Recent technological advances may soon bring immersive virtual reality (IVR) out of the laboratory and into the homes of consumers. This means that IVR systems will be deployed in settings where the physical interaction space is very limited in size. If users wish to navigate virtual environments on foot, these spatial constraints are problematic since they make real walking infeasible. Walking-in-Place (WIP) techniques constitute a convenient and inexpensive approach to facilitating walking within virtual environments.

This thesis focuses on the factors influencing the degree of perceived naturalness of WIP locomotion; i.e., the degree to which the user’s experience of walking through a virtual environment using WIP locomotion is mistakable for the experience of real walking. I take the degree of correspondence between the sensorimotor loops of real walking and WIP locomotion as my point of departure, and explore how to facilitate perceptually natural actions (steps in place) and natural self-motion perception (virtual walking speeds). The primary contributions of the presented work are the findings of ten studies and two meta-analyses documented in the seven papers.