Redirection Using Alignment

Unobstructed locomotion in virtual reality (VR) using natural walking is often not possible due to the differing placement of obstacles in the physical and virtual environments. Redirected walking is a technique that helps to enable natural walking in VR by imperceptibly rotating the virtual environment such that users adjust their physical trajectory and avoid physical obstacles. Traditionally, the algorithms responsible for applying redirected walking focused mainly on steering users away from physical obstacles, with little regard for the locations of obstacles in the virtual environment. However, recent work showed that considering both the physical and virtual environments when applying redirected walking can lead to significantly fewer collisions with physical obstacles. We formalize the notion of alignment: the concept of comparing the physical and virtual environments according to some feature present in both environments. We provide a generalized definition of alignment that allows it to be used in any research problem, and we present an example of how alignment can be used to yield significant improvements in VR locomotion with redirected walking.