The Space Bender: Supporting Natural Walking via Overt Manipulation of the Virtual Environment

Manipulating the appearance of a Virtual Environment to enable natural walking has so far focused on modifications that are intended to be unnoticed by users. In our research, we took a radically different approach by embracing the overt nature of the change. To explore this method, we designed the Space Bender, a natural walking technique for room-scale VR. It builds on the idea of overtly manipulating the Virtual Environment by "bending" the geometry whenever the user comes in proximity of a physical boundary. Our aim was to evaluate the feasibility of this approach in terms of performance and subjective feedback. We compared the Space Bender to two other similarly situated techniques: Stop and Reset and Teleportation, in a task requiring participants to traverse a 100 m path. Results show that the Space Bender was significantly faster than Stop and Reset, and preferred to the Teleportation technique, highlighting the potential of overt manipulation to facilitate natural walking.