Evaluation of an Omnidirectional Walking-in-Place User Interface with Virtual Locomotion Speed Scaled by Forward Leaning Angle

Virtual locomotion is an enabling ability for many tasks in virtual environments (VEs) and denotes the most common form of interaction with VEs. In this paper we present a novel omnidirectional walking-in-place (WIP) locomotion system, which we designed to work in small laboratory environments and is based entirely on consumer hardware. We present our hardware and software solution to 360 degrees omnidirectional tracking based on multiple Kinects and an Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD). Using this novel setup we improved on the related work by evaluating leaning as a novel parameter of WIP interfaces. Inspired by observations of changing leaning angles during fast or slow locomotor movements in the real world, we present the Leaning-Amplified-Speed Walking-in-Place (LAS-WIP) user interface in this paper. We present the results of an experiment in which we show that leaning angle can have a positive effect on subjective estimates of self-motion perception and usability, which provides novel vistas for future research.

@InProceedings\{LEGVBS15,
  author       = "Langbehn, Eike and Eichler, Tobias and Ghose, Sobin and von Luck, Kai and Bruder, Gerd and Steinicke, Frank",
  title        = "Evaluation of an Omnidirectional Walking-in-Place User Interface with Virtual Locomotion Speed Scaled by Forward Leaning Angle",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the GI Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality (GI VR/AR)",
  pages        = "149--160",
  year         = "2015",
  keywords     = "hammaburg",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2015/LEGVBS15"
}