Modeling Locomotion with Body Angular Movements in Virtual Reality

This study proposes a time prediction model for locomotion along a polyline path with body angular movements in Virtual Reality (VR). We divide such locomotion into two components: navigating in multiple line-segment paths and turning at line-segment intersections. In the first component, locomotion in each line-segment path consists of acceleration, maximum velocity, and deceleration phases. We formulate equations to estimate the locomotion time for each phase and accumulated them to model the total time. In the second component, a linear relationship was revealed between task time and turning angles. We established an integrated model based on the equations of the two components and verified the effectiveness of the model with three experiments. The results indicate that our model outperformed two baseline models with a greater R2 and a smaller gap between the predicted and actual time. Our study benefits VR locomotion design with body angular movements.