F-RDW: Redirected Walking With Forecasting Future Position.

Abstract

In order to serve better VR experiences to users, existing predictive methods of Redirected Walking (RDW) exploit future information to reduce the number of reset occurrences. However, such methods often impose a precondition during deployment, either in the virtual environment's layout or the user's walking direction, which constrains its universal applications. To tackle this challenge, we propose a mechanism F-RDW that is twofold: (1) forecasts the future information of a user in the virtual space without any assumptions by using the conventional method, and (2) fuse this information while maneuvering existing RDW methods. The backbone of the first step is an LSTM-based model that ingests the user's spatial and eye-tracking data to predict the user's future position in the virtual space, and the following step feeds those predicted values into existing RDW methods (such as MPCRed, S2C, TAPF, and ARC) while respecting their internal mechanism in applicable ways. The results of our simulation test and user study demonstrate the significance of future information when using RDW in small physical spaces or complex environments. We prove that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces the number of resets and increases the traveled distance between resets, hence augmenting the redirection performance of all RDW methods explored in this work. Our project and dataset are available at https://github.com/YonseiCGnA-VR/F-RDW.