Estimating human sensitivity to curving of segmented paths within room-size environment

Abstract

The curvature gain of the redirected walking (RDW) technique can map a straight virtual path to an arced real path, which enables users to real walk in large virtual space. However, the human perceptual abilities for curvature gain are mainly estimated on single walking paths in some large spaces, showing a lack of understanding the cognitive performance for more complex path conditions in room-size spaces. To explore this issue, this paper conducts three studies by using a novel psychophysical method of limits to evaluate human perception of curvature gain under different conditions of virtual paths. First, we evaluate the perception of path curving under a single path condition and reveal the impact of the path curving direction. Second, we study the ability to perceive curvature gain on a postorder path when the curving direction and degree of its preorder path vary. Our results show a moderation effect on the perceptual ability for the postorder path if both paths are in the same curving direction. Finally, we explore the effect of the preorder path length on the human sensitivity to the postorder curvature gain and demonstrate that longer preorder paths can increase the ability of users to adapt to postorder path curving. This paper reveals the adaptation characteristic of the curvature gain under complex path conditions, contributing to the development of path-based RDW methods.