VR designers are constantly trying to make the experience more immersive and more natural. However, fully natural locomotion is very difficult to simulate. A user is limited to walking in the available space within a room, while almost all virtual environments are much larger. Semi-natural locomotion devices and techniques such as treadmills and walking-in-place aim to provide a somewhat natural walking experience while keeping the user in the same physical location. Our prior work showed that the semi-natural Virtusphere device was inferior in many aspects of user experience to both fully natural walking and non-natural gamepad-based navigation. In this project, we examine the Virtuix Omni, a state-of-the-art consumer locomotion device that claims to provide a natural walking and running experience for immersive VR games. Using an existing testbed of locomotion tasks that evaluates a technique’s accuracy, speed, game experience, and support for spatial orientation, we compared the Omni to a standard gamepad controller technique and to real walking in a large tracked space. The experiment showed that overall user experience with real walking is still superior to both of the other locomotion techniques.
Proceedings
User experience with semi-natural locomotion techniques in virtual reality Proceedings
2017, ISBN: 9781450354868.