In recent years immersive real-time interactive 3D computer environments (virtual reality or VR) have become an invaluable tool for research and development, training, healthcare, commerce, communication, and education, as well as a medium for entertainment. Yet, in general, the use of current VR systems requires travel to specialized facilities in which a sophisticated infrastructure has been pre-installed at great expense. Furthermore, although fully immersive systems that allow teams of users to concurrently explore a simulated environment by walking, turning, and looking around in a natural manner are particularly useful because they provide increased realism through multisensory stimulation, current VR facilities often support only one user at a time who is constrained to explore the virtual world by means of an artificial interface or a movement metaphor that is arbitrary and awkward (e.g., treadmills or walking in place). For most people, the benefits of VR are thus relatively inaccessible and fall quite short of their promise. In this collaborative effort between Miami University and the Naval Postgraduate School, the PIs will conduct research whose goal is to develop an innovative immersive VR system that is completely portable, that will allow multiple users to be immersed simultaneously, and that can be used in any large indoor or outdoor area such as a gymnasium or parking lot. Users will be able to walk naturally for miles in a virtual world without ever becoming aware of the physical limits of the tracking space or the locations of other users. A system capable of immersing a single user will cost an order of magnitude less than current systems. To these ends the PIs will exploit two emerging techniques: redirected walking, an algorithm that imperceptibly steers users away from obstacles such as walls and which the PIs have previously shown can, given a physical area of sufficient size, enable users to navigate through a virtual world of unlimited size in a natural manner without encountering real-world boundaries and obstacles; and self contained inertial position tracking, which prior research has shown can be used to accurately monitor and track the position and orientation of the user's viewpoint in space without the need for pre-installed permanent infrastructure. In addition, the PIs will integrate into the new VR technology ultrasonic mapping and positioning, a technique commonly used in robotics to provide estimates of absolute position.
Broader Impacts: By creating VR systems that are portable and relatively inexpensive, this research will take significant steps toward making VR technology available to a much broader range of people than has heretofore been possible, providing first-hand exposure to cutting-edge concepts and models in science and technology to any population that educators or researchers chose. In particular, the work will enable students at any grade level to experience computer simulations and models by walking within them, instead of by reading about them or by viewing them as an outside observer. The synthesis of redirected walking and self-contained inertial position tracking will offer rich research potential in the computer and behavioral sciences. Implementing relative position tracking through inertial sensors and periodic position fixes instantiates a biologically plausible model of navigation and can parallel research on how humans and other animals find their way through environments.
