OVR Advanced Settings Adds Redirected Walking (But Your Room Probably Isn’t Big Enough)

A major update to OVR Advanced Settings adds redirected walking to steer you toward the center of your play space and away from the edges of your room.

For those unfamiliar, OVR Advanced Settings adds a number of useful settings accessible via a dashboard while using Steam inside your VR headset. You can set supersampling values that can affect the sharpness of your picture or temporarily move or rotate your playspace and do a lot more. The software’s latest update adds a new feature that might be interesting to explore if you have an extraordinarily large playspace — redirected walking.

What is redirected walking?

The idea of “redirected walking” is for the geometry of a virtual environment to dynamically change to keep you within your physical playspace. The concept is traditionally restricted to labs and there are multiple research tracks exploring different approaches. Some researchers, for instance, have looked into whether reliable high-quality eye tracking might be used to adjust a virtual world in between your blinks, or during the momentary adjustment period when your eyes shift position. More traditionally, software could be made to nudge you away from the edges of your available virtual space without eye tracking by cleverly moving the placement of virtual doorways when you aren’t looking, or spacing out the nudges over a large enough area that you don’t notice. The problem with these methods is it typically requires extraordinarily large play spaces, and that appears to be true as well for the feature in OVR Advanced Settings.

I tried it out in a 4 meter by 4 meter room on the strongest setting and the redirection wasn’t strong enough to enable me to, say, walk from the indoors to the outdoors of the standard SteamVR Home space. The adjustment of the playspace at that setting also made me a bit uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, it is notable the feature is broadly available now. If you happen to have an absurdly large play area for VR and/or a backpack PC we’d love to hear reports of how the software works.

You can find OVR Advanced Settings on Steam or Github.

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Microsoft Researchers Built A City-Scale Redirected VR Walking System

In Steven Spielberg’s 2018 adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One, on the Planet Doom in the network of simulated places known as The OASIS there’s a climactic battle for control over that fictional multiverse.

In the film, set decades in the future, fans of The OASIS run down physical streets decked out in VR gear while their systems seamlessly map virtual worlds onto their physical surroundings — thus maintaining the illusion indefinitely. Sure it looks pretty socially awkward and raises uncomfortable questions about the value people place on their physical environment, but it still represents a remarkable technical achievement if it could actually be done:

Even technical viewers, though, steeped in VR technology might look at such depictions and wonder if this sort of thing would ever be feasible. It isn’t readily apparent, for instance, how a virtual world could compensate and change to allow for navigation while strolling through public spaces outdoors.

Turns out Microsoft researchers are already figuring out those answers. The publication of a new paper presented as part of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) titled “DreamWalker” comes from Stanford University PhD student Jackie Yang, who was a Microsoft Research intern during the work, and Microsoft researchers Eyal OfekAndy Wilson, and Christian Holz. The paper reveals in detail how they built a city-scale redirected walking system for VR on top of a Samsung Odyssey headset and additional sensing hardware.

DreamWalker

microsoft redirected walking city scale dreamwalker

The paper’s full title is“DreamWalker: Substituting Real-World Walking Experiences with a Virtual Reality” and you can read the entire 14-page PDF yourself.

In summary, though, “we explore a future in which people spend considerably more time in virtual reality, even during moments when they walk between locations in the real world.” DreamWalker builds on earlier research while working “in unseen large-scale, uncontrolled and public areas on contiguous paths in the real-world that are void of moving vehicles.”

According to the paper:

“The Windows Mixed Reality system provides inside-out tracking on a Samsung Odyssey VR headset, updating sensed 6D locations at 90 Hz. Empirically, we measured 1 m of drift over a course of just 30 m through the inside-out tracking alone. Two Intel RealSense 425 cameras provide RGB depth images, slightly angled and rotated 90 degrees to achieve a large field of view (86◦ × 98◦). We built a custom adapter for the backpack computer that converts Thunderbolt 3 to four USB 3 ports and thus supports the bandwidth required to stream both RGB depth cameras at a resolution of 640×480 (depth) and 640×480 (RGB) at 30 Hz. Finally, GPS data comes from the sensor inside a Xiaomi Mi 8 phone…”

The paper describes how measurements from all these devices is combined and analyzed to keep the person in VR on a safe and comfortable path through the real world without ever taking the headset off such that “8 participants walked across campus along a 15-minute route, experiencing a virtual Manhattan that was full of animated cars, people, and other objects.”

In the video below you can see different ways the software encourages people to stay on the right path, including using “humanoid” animated virtual characters which “move into the location of detected obstacles and guide the user towards the destination.”

The conclusion for the paper states “each participant confidently walked for 15 minutes in DreamWalker, which showed the potential of our system to make repetitive real-world walking tasks more entertaining.”

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Researchers Exploit Natural Quirk of Human Vision for Hidden Redirected Walking in VR

Researches from Stony Brook University, NVIDIA, and Adobe have devised a system which hides so-called ‘redirected walking’ techniques using saccades, natural eye movements which act like a momentary blindspot. Redirected walking changes the direction that a user is walking to create the illusion of moving through a larger virtual space than the physical space would allow.

Update (4/27/18): The researchers behind this work have reached out with the finished video presentation for the work, which has been included below.

Original Article (3/28/18): At NVIDIA’s GTC 2018 conference this week, researchers Anjul Patney and Qi Sun presented their saccade-driven redirected walking system for dynamic room-scale VR. Redirected walking uses novel techniques to steer users in VR away from real-world obstacles like walls, with the goal of creating the illusion of traversing a larger space than is actually available to the user.

There’s a number of ways to implement redirected walking, but the strengths of this saccade-driven method is that it’s hidden from the user, widely applicable to VR content, and dynamic, allowing the system to direct users away from objects newly introduced into the environment, and even moving objects, the researchers say.

The basic principle behind their work is an exploitation of a natural quirk of human vision—saccadic suppression—to hide small rotations to the virtual scene. Saccades are quick eye movements which happen when we move our gaze from one part of a scene to another. Instead of moving in a slow continuous motion from one gaze point to the next, our eyes quickly dart about, when not tracking a moving object or focused on a singular point, a process which takes tens of milliseconds.

An eye undertaking regular saccades

Saccadic suppression occurs during these movements, essentially rendering us blind for a brief moment until the eye reaches its new point of fixation. With precise eye-tracking technology from SMI and an HTC Vive headset, the researchers are able to detect and exploit that temporary blindness to hide a slight rotation of the scene from the user. As the user walks forward and looks around the scene, it is slowly rotated, just a few degrees per saccade, such that the user reflexively alters their walking direction in response to the new visual cues.

This method allows the system to steer users away from real-world walls, even when it seems like they’re walking in a straight line in the virtual world, creating the illusion that the the virtual space is significantly larger than the corresponding virtual space.

A VR backpack allows a user at GTC 2018 to move through the saccadic redirected walking demo without a tether. | Photo by Road to VR

The researchers have devised a GPU accelerated real-time path planning system, which dynamically adjusts the hidden scene rotation to redirect the user’s walking. Because the path planning routine operates in real-time, Patney and Sun say that it can account for objects newly introduced into the real world environment (like a chair), and can even be used to steer users clear of moving obstacles, like pets or potentially even other VR users inhabiting the same space.

The research is being shown off in a working demo this week at GTC 2018. An academic paper based on the work is expect to be published later this year.

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