Self-overlapping maze and map design for asymmetric collaboration in room-scale virtual reality for public spaces

Abstract

This paper addresses two problems of public room-scale Virtual Reality (VR) setups. These are the lack of walkable space due to the restricted room-scale tracking area, and the isolating experience provided by a single Head-Mounted Display (HMD). We propose and demonstrate a design for constructing a naturally walkable self-overlapping maze and a corresponding unfolded map to facilitate asymmetric collaboration between the participant wearing an HMD and the co-located participants without HMDs. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the usability of the design and participants’ experience. Our work can be useful when designing self-overlapping architectures for limited physical spaces and when supporting asymmetric experiences in public VR setups.