Walking in the Wild: Safe and Natural Redirected Walking in Open Physical Spaces

Redirected Walking (RDW) enables continuous locomotion in virtual environments (VEs) within limited physical spaces. However, classic RDW methods rely on static settings with tight boundaries, which can reduce their applicability in large shared physical spaces where boundary constraints are not dominant, especially under dynamic and multi-user conditions. To overcome this, we introduce a new task: Redirected Walking in Open Physical Spaces (OPSRDW), which allows users to navigate expansive VEs safely and naturally despite dynamic obstacles and without requiring a fixed boundary model. We further propose Dynamic Control and Redirection with Safety Constraints (DyCoRe), which formulates OPS-RDW as a constrained optimization problem. DyCoRe uses Dynamic Control Barrier Functions to model real-time collision avoidance constraints and solves an online Quadratic Programming problem to compute optimal velocities that minimize path deviation while ensuring safety. These velocities are mapped into real-time redirection gains, guiding users along natural paths while reducing collision risk. A relaxation mechanism is incorporated to handle infeasible scenarios. Extensive simulations suggest consistent improvements in safety and obstacle clearance over state-of-theart methods. User studies demonstrate that DyCoRe significantly improves navigation continuity, reduces the number of resets, and tends to reduce perceived discomfort compared to classic RDW strategies. DyCoRe provides an efficient and learning-free solution for safe and natural VR locomotion in open physical spaces with dynamic obstacles and multiple users.