Title:
Exploring Impossible Spaces: Practical Illusions in Virtual Reality
Abstract:
Movement in 3D space presents one of the fundamental interaction challenges for the field of immersive virtual environments. Expansive virtual worlds, such as those commonly required by immersive training simulators, are typically too large to fit within practical real-world workspaces, making them impossible to fully explore through natural physical body movement. In this talk, I will describe a series of virtual reality experiments that investigated the use of perceptual illusions to address this limitation, thereby forming “impossible spaces.” By leveraging phenomena such as change blindness and topological violations of Euclidean space, these illusions can be used to fool the senses into experiencing an expansive virtual environment, despite the fact that users are unknowingly walking in circles in the real world. Results from our formal studies have shown these manipulations to be extremely subtle and effective, thereby empowering natural locomotion for use in a wider range of practical environments and situations.
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