Telewalk: Towards Free and Endless Walking in Room-Scale Virtual Reality

Natural navigation in VR is challenging due to spatial limitations. While Teleportation enables navigation within very small physical spaces and without causing motion sickness symptoms, it may reduce the feeling of presence and spacial awareness. Redirected walking (RDW), in contrast, allows users to naturally walk while staying inside a finite, but still very large, physical space. We present Telewalk, a novel locomotion approach that combines curvature and translation gains known from RDW research in a perceivable way. This combination enables Telewalk to be applied even within a physical space of 3m x 3m. Utilizing the head rotation as input device enables directional changes without any physical turns to keep the user always on an optimal circular path inside the real world while freely walking inside the virtual one. In a user study we found that even though motion sickness susceptible participants reported respective symptoms, Telewalk did result in stronger feelings of presence and immersion and was seen as more natural then Teleportation.