Abstract
Real walking while wearing a tracked head-mounted display (HMD) is considered one of the most natural forms of locomotion in a virtual environment (VE). However, a straightforward implementation of real walking in virtual reality (VR) installations is not possible considering that the available tracked space is limited. Redirected Walking (RDW) presents a perceptually-inspired solution to this challenge by introducing subliminal visual rotations of the VE around the observer's position. Previous work investigated the potential of saccadic suppression for masking of large discrete changes in the visual stimulus but suffered from false positives in the classification of saccades, resulting in detectable visual manipulations. In this work, we designed an eye tracked HMD setup which detects eye blinks instead of saccades and leverages change blindness for visual manipulations. We performed a user evaluation using the eye tracked HMD setup in a within-subjects design in which we analyzed the participants' sensitivity to trans-blink scene changes and identified thresholds of visually undetectable rotations in a virtual world. Our results show that change detectability depends on rotation angles and scene layout. Overall, eye blinks were found to be an applicable tool for guiding users on physical paths that deviate from the visually perceived paths.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017