Walking Telescope: Exploring the Zooming Effect in Expanding Detection Threshold Range for Translation Gain

Redirected Walking (RDW) is a locomotion technique utilized in virtual reality. It involves manipulating the displayed scene to redirect the user without their awareness, causing them to adjust their position and orientation naturally in response to perceived motion. This technique enhances the user’s immersion and smoothens their exploration of the virtual environment, enabling them to navigate a greater range of virtual spaces within a confined physical area. One key element in redirected walking is translation gain, which scales the speed of the user’s virtual movement, allowing them to traverse the virtual environment faster or slower. However, its effectiveness is constrained by the detection threshold imposed on it. Since translation gain primarily capitalizes on the imprecision of human distance perception, while in real life telescopes can also confuse people’s judgment of distance, taking inspiration from this phenomenon, we propose an approach called Walking Telescope. The Walking Telescope approach involves modifying the field of view (FoV) by filling the entire headset view with a small range of viewpoints. We discovered that the threshold range of translation gain expands when the FoV is smaller than the original FoV of the headset. Furthermore, as the FoV gradually decreases, the threshold range of translation gain progressively expands. As a comparison, we also experimented with reducing the FoV by simply decreasing the visual range. This method does not produce a zoom-in effect similar to that of a telescope. To ensure user comfort, we identified a suitable FoV range by calculating the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) score. This approach allows for an expanded threshold range for translation gain without reducing the user’s comfort level.