Abstract
This paper describes a metaphor that allows people to move around an immersive virtual environment by “walking in place”. Positional data of participants’ head movements are obtained from a tracking sensor on a head-mounted display during a training session, where they alternate between walking in place and a range of other activities. The data is fed to a neural net pattern recogniser that learns to recognise the person’s walking in place behaviour. This is used in a virtual reality system to allow people to move through the virtual environment by simulating the kinds of kinesthetic actions and sensory perceptions involved in walking. An experiment was carried out to compare this method of navigation with the familiar alternative that involves using a hand-held pointing device, such as a 3D mouse. The experiment suggests that the walking in place method may enhance the participant’s sense of presence, but that it is not advantageous with respect to the efficiency of navigation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Brooks, F. P. etal. (1992) Final Technical Report: Walkthrough Project, Six Generations of Building Walkthroughs, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N. C. 27599–3175.
Ellis, S. R. (1991) Nature and Origin of Virtual Environments: A Bibliographic Essay, Computing Systems in Engineering, 2 (4), 321–347.
Foley, J. D. (1987) Interfaces for Advanced Computing, Scientific American, October, 126–135.
Gibson, E. J. and R. D. Walk (1960) The visual cliff, Scientific American, 202, 64–71.
Heeter, C. (1992) Being There: The Subjective Experience of Presence, Telepresence, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1(2), MIT Press, 262–271.
Held, R. M. and N. I. Durlach (1992) Telepresence, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, winter, MIT Press, 109–112.
Iwata, H. and K. Matsuda (1992) Haptic Walkthrough Simulator: Its Design and Application to Studies on Cognitive Map, The Second International Conference on Artificial Reality and Tele-existence, ICAT 92, 185–192.
Loomis, J. M. (1992) Distal Attribution and Presence, Telepresence, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, MIT Press, 113–119.
Loomis, J. M. (1992) Presence and distal attribution: Phenomenology, determinants and assessment, SPIE 1666 Human Vision, Visual Processing, and Digital Display IE, 590–595.
Mackinlay, J. D., S. K. Card, G. G. Robertson (1990) Rapid Controlled Movement Through a Virtual 3D Workspace, Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 24 (4), 171–176.
Sheridan, T. B. (1992) Musings on Telepresence and Virtual Presence, Telepresence, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1, winter, MIT Press, 120–126.
Shneiderman, B. (1987) Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Slater, M. and M. Usoh (1992) An Experimental Exploration of Presence in Virtual Environments, Department of Computer Science, QMW University of London, Technical Report no. 689.
Slater, M. and M. Usoh (1993) The Influence of a Virtual Body on Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments, VR 93, Virtual Reality International, Proceedings of the third annual conference on Virtual Reality, Meckler, London, 34–42.
Slater, M. and M. Usoh (1993) Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference-Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium, Seattle, WA, 90–96.
Slater, M., M. Usoh, A. Steed (1994) Depth of Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, MIT Press 3 (2), 130–144.
M. Slater, M. Usoh, A. Steed (1995) Taking Steps: The Influence of a Walking Metaphor on Presence in Virtual Reality, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI) Special Issue on Virtual Reality (in press).
Steuer, J. (1992) Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence, Journal of Communication 42 (4), 73–93.
Ware, C. and S. Osborne (1990) Exploration and Virtual Camera Control in Virtual Three Dimensional Environments, Proceedings of the 1990 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH, March 1990, 175–183.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer-Verlag/Wien
About this paper
Cite this paper
Slater, M., Steed, A., Usoh, M. (1995). The Virtual Treadmill: A Naturalistic Metaphor for Navigation in Immersive Virtual Environments. In: Göbel, M. (eds) Virtual Environments ’95. Eurographics. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-9433-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-9433-1_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna
Print ISBN: 978-3-211-82737-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-9433-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive