Highly Immersive Environments

Motion platforms have been widely used in Virtual Reality (VR) systems for decades to simulate motion in virtual environments. Currently, the development of new VR immersive systems faces unique challenges to respond to user’s requirements, such as introducing high resolution 360° panoramic images and videos. This new visual information lacks the possibility of calculating the motion properties (acceleration) and makes traditional control systems for motion platforms fail. This paper presents a new method for generating non-real time gravito-inertial cues for motion platforms using a system based on VR and video imagery. It is a hybrid method where part of the gravito-inertial cues (those with acceleration information) are generated using a classical approach, through the application of physical modeling in a VR scene utilizing washout filters. The motion cues generated by the washout filter were modified according to the contributions of different experts based on a successive approximation method. In addition, part of the gravito-inertial cues (the ones coming from synthetic images and video, without acceleration information) were generated ad-hoc in a semi-manual way. The performance evaluation of this proposed method showed that 84% of the participants preferred the hybrid system versus a system based solely on the classical washout. Our approach has been tested with three different experts, and the final system, developed as part of an international road safety education campaign, had more than ten thousand attendees.