Spatial Contraction Based on Velocity Variation for Natural Walking in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) offers an immersive 3D digital environment, but enabling natural walking sensations without the constraints of physical space remains a technological challenge. Previous VR locomotion methods, including game controller, teleportation, treadmills, walking-in-place, and redirected walking (RDW), have made strides towards overcoming this challenge. However, these methods also face limitations such as possible unnaturalness, additional hardware requirements, or motion sickness risks. This paper introduces "Spatial Contraction (SC)", an innovative VR locomotion method inspired by the phenomenon of Lorentz contraction in Special Relativity. Similar to the Lorentz contraction, our SC contracts the virtual space along the user's velocity direction in response to velocity variation. The virtual space contracts more when the user's speed is high, whereas minimal or no contraction happens at low speeds. We provide a virtual space transformation method for spatial contraction and optimize the user experience in smoothness and stability. Through SC, VR users can effectively traverse a longer virtual distance with a shorter physical walking. Different from locomotion gains, the spatial contraction effect is observable by the user and aligns with their intentions, so there is no inconsistency between the user's proprioception and visual perception. SC is a general locomotion method that has no special requirements for VR scenes. The experimental results of our live user studies in various virtual scenarios demonstrate that SC has a significant effect in reducing both the number of resets and the physical walking distance users need to cover. Furthermore, experiments have also demonstrated that SC has the potential for integration with existing locomotion techniques such as RDW.