Automated path prediction for redirected walking using navigation meshes

Abstract

Redirected walking techniques have been introduced to overcome physical space limitations for natural locomotion in virtual reality. These techniques decouple real and virtual user trajectories by subtly steering the user away from the boundaries of the physical space while maintaining the illusion that the user follows the intended virtual path. Effectiveness of redirection algorithms can significantly improve when a reliable prediction of the users future virtual path is available. In current solutions, the future user trajectory is predicted based on non-standardized manual annotations of the environment structure, which is both tedious and inflexible. We propose a method for automatically generating environment annotation graphs and predicting the user trajectory using navigation meshes. We discuss the integration of this method with existing redirected walking algorithms such as FORCE and MPCRed. Automated annotation of the virtual environments structure enables simplified deployment of these algorithms in any virtual environment.