Recalibration of Rotational Locomotion in Immersive Virtual Environments

This work uses an immersive virtual environment (IVE) to examine how people maintain a calibration between biomechanical and visual information for rotational self-motion. First, we show that no rotational recalibration occurs when visual and biomechanical rates of rotation are matched. Next, we demonstrate that mismatched physical and visual rotation rates cause rotational recalibration. Although previous work has shown that rotational locomotion can be recalibrated in real environments, this work extends the finding to virtual environments. We further show that people do not completely recalibrate left and right rotations independently when different visual-biomechanical discrepancies are used for left and right rotations during a recalibration phase. Finally, since the majority of participants did not notice mismatched physical and visual rotation rates, we discuss the implications of using such mismatches to enable IVE users to explore a virtual space larger than the physical space they are in.