A Study on Multi-User Interaction-based Redirected Walking

The most intuitive mode of locomotion in VR experiences is natural walking, which is constrained by the size of the walkable physical area. Perception-based locomotion techniques such as Redirected Walking (RDW) can circumvent this limitation by using artificial manipulations of the user's position or rotation in VR. In this work, we focus on integrating redirection techniques into a continuous, uninterrupted VR experience and analyze the effects of interactions in VR between two remote users in a shared virtual space to hide discrete redirections from the user's perception as much as possible. Our results show that discrete translations, which our subjects used to cover an average of 37.8% of their distance, were almost imperceptible during the execution of the collaborative interactions for 81% of our participants. Only 9.5% of our study participants noticed rotation gains. Based on these results, we provide guidelines on how developers can more effectively use RDW techniques in multi-user VR experiences.