Cognitive Resource Demands of Redirected Walking

Abstract

Redirected walking allows users to walk through a large-scale immersive virtual environment (IVE) while physically remaining in a reasonably small workspace. Therefore, manipulations are applied to virtual camera motions so that the user's self-motion in the virtual world differs from movements in the real world. Previous work found that the human perceptual system tolerates a certain amount of inconsistency between proprioceptive, vestibular and visual sensation in IVEs, and even compensates for slight discrepancies with recalibrated motor commands. Experiments showed that users are not able to detect an inconsistency if their physical path is bent with a radius of at least 22 meters during virtual straightforward movements. If redirected walking is applied in a smaller workspace, manipulations become noticeable, but users are still able to move through a potentially infinitely large virtual world by walking. For this semi-natural form of locomotion, the question arises if such manipulations impose cognitive demands on the user, which may compete with other tasks in IVEs for finite cognitive resources. In this article we present an experiment in which we analyze the mutual influence between redirected walking and verbal as well as spatial working memory tasks using a dual-tasking method. The results show an influence of redirected walking on verbal as well as spatial working memory tasks, and we also found an effect of cognitive tasks on walking behavior. We discuss the implications and provide guidelines for using redirected walking in virtual reality laboratories.

Can I Think of Something Else when Using a BCI?

“…In order to measure the cognitive demand of a task, the classical approach is to use a dual-task paradigm [5,7,17,25].…”

“…At the end of each sequence, feedback was provided as a score to indicate the number of correct answers over the last 4 letters (the first N being irrelevant, as there is no N-th previous one to compare to). Consecutive letters were spaced in time with a randomized interval between 1.6 and 2.0s (as in [28] and [7]), with constraints ensuring that (1) the total duration of the first N letters was N * 1.8s; and (2) the total duration of the last 4 letters was 7.2s (see Figure 1). These constraints ensured the synchronization with the constant pace of the primary task.…”

Head Tracking: A Comprehensive Review

“…The result of our study indicates that rotational head tracking have generally superior performance & usability than translational head tracking system [35][36][37][38]. The study shows that there were no notable variation among complete head tracking and rotational head tracking for work duration, time to discover display-case objects, time to recognize the hidden objects behind the counter & task errors [39][40][41][42].…”

Literature review of locomotion techniques in virtual reality

“…Analyzing the mutual influence between redirected walking and two different (verbal and spatial) working memory tasks using a dual-tasking method (Bruder et al, 2015) -…”

“…This technique works by interactively rotating the virtual scene about the user, such that the user is made to continually walk towards the farthest "wall" of the tracker area (see Figure 9). Therefore, users are guided unnoticeably on a physical path that differs from the path the user perceives in the virtual world by manipulating the transformations from real to virtual movements (Bruder et al, 2015). For example, virtually rotating the view in the HMD to one side with every step causes the user to unknowingly compensate by walking a circular arc in the opposite direction, while having the illusion of walking on a straight trajectory (Nabiyouni et al, 2015).…”