Dynamic Foveated Rendering for Redirected Walking in VR | Patent

Patented | Redirected walking is a Virtual Reality(VR) locomotion technique that enables users to navigate virtual environments (VEs) that are spatially larger than the available tracked physical space.

In this work, we present a novel technique for redirected walking in VR based on the psychological phenomenon of inattentional blindness. Based on the user's visual fixation points, we divide the user's view into zones. Spatially-varying rotations are applied according to the zone's importance and are rendered using foveated rendering. Our technique is real-time and applicable to small physical spaces. Furthermore, the proposed technique does not require stimulating saccades but rather takes advantage of naturally occurring saccades and blinks for a complete refresh of the framebuffer. We performed extensive testing and presented the analysis of the results of three user studies conducted for the evaluation.

Left: Orientation-based redirection using dynamic-foveated rendering, which leverages the effect of inattentional blindness induced by a cognitive task. The blending (e.g., the parallax of green alien) in the transition zone between the rotated virtual environment (VE) (non-foveal) and the non-rotated VE (foveal) is imperceptible by the users due to inattentional blindness. Right: The path walked in physical tracked space (PTS) up to that point is shown in orange color. The corresponding path in the VE is shown in blue color. The cyan-colored box indicates the 4 x 4 m^2 available PTS, and the camera icon inside the box indicates the location of the user w.r.t. the PTS. Even with room-scale PTS such as the one used, the users could walk distances in the virtual environment (VE) which are up to almost 18 x orders of magnitude higher than the longest distance in the PTS; the maximum recorded in experiments was 103.9m.