A Novel Method of Multi-user Redirected Walking for Large-Scale Virtual Environments

Abstract

The wireless virtual reality (VR) solution for Head-Mounted Display (HMD) expands the support to multi-user VR system, so multiple users or participants can collaborate in the same physical space for a large-scale virtual environment. The foremost technical obstacle of multi-user VR system is how to accommodate multiple users within the same physical space. It needs address the problem of potential collisions among these users who are moving both virtually and physically. By analyzing the challenges of multiple users, this paper presents a novel method of multi-user redirected walking for large-scale virtual environments. In this method, an improved approach is presented to calculate the rotation gains, and a user clustering algorithm is adopted to divide the users into groups that are automatically adjusted based on the distance between the boundaries or the size of remaining space. Then a heuristic algorithm for three-user or two-user redirected walking is designed to solve the problem of multi-user roaming in a faster and more efficient way than traditional methods. To verify the validity of our method, we used a computer simulation framework to statistically analyze the influence of different factors, such as the physical space size and the number of users. The results show that our multi-user redirected walking algorithm for large-scale virtual environments is effective and practical.