Walking in Two Directions at Once

Walking constitutes a fundamental method for traversing virtual environments, i.e. pressing buttons as an abstracted way to move around such as in videogames. With the second advent of virtual reality devices, virtual walking has gained traction and is gradually becoming a more embodied experience. The ability of virtual reality hardware systems to rudimentarily track the human body allows us to explore a virtual space by physically walking through it. Room-Scaling creates a direct mapping between our bodily movements in the physical room and our corresponding virtual movements. Another technique called Redirected Walking takes virtual walking a step further by disengaging the physical from the virtual space – theoretically – providing the opportunity to virtual walk infinitely in a finite physical space. Based on my research with virtual reality developers, I explore the ideas behind different locomotion styles such as Teleportation and Redirected Walking and the ways developers use and trick our perception to create believable virtual walking and locomotion methods.

行走是遍历虚拟环境的核心方式——正如电子游戏中常见的交互逻辑，使用者可通过按键这一抽象手段实现空间移动。随着第二代虚拟现实设备的兴起，虚拟行走逐渐获得行业关注，并愈发成为一种具身化的交互体验。虚拟现实硬件系统具备初步追踪人体姿态的能力，这使得使用者能够通过实体行走的方式探索虚拟空间。其中，房间尺度漫游（Room-Scaling）将实体房间内的肢体动作与对应的虚拟移动建立直接映射关系。另一项名为重定向行走（Redirected Walking）的技术则进一步拓展了虚拟行走的边界：从理论层面脱离实体空间与虚拟空间的绑定，使得使用者能够在有限的实体空间内实现无限的虚拟行走。基于与虚拟现实开发者的合作研究，本文探讨了传送（Teleportation）、重定向行走等不同移动交互方式背后的设计理念，以及开发者如何巧妙利用人类感知特性，打造具备高度真实感的虚拟行走与移动方案。