An Open Framework for Infinite Walking With Saccadic Redirection

In this project we created an expandable framework for allowing infinite walking in virtual reality in a closed play area. A saccade is a rapid eye movement with a unique property: the eye temporarily gathers reduced information – saccadic suppression. We leverage the suppression to redirect the user’s walking towards the center of the play area by rotating the virtual world around the camera’s location. With the VR environment and corresponding pre and post experience questions we could already show an improvement in understanding on a set of participants. Modern VR hardware such as the Vive Eye Pro allows a reasonable sample rate of eye movement measurements. A self-developed VR testing environment was used and with corresponding pre and post experience questions we tested a group of participants regarding general motion and VR- sickness parameters. We found a certain angle for the maximum saccade rotation which was base of further testing. We found, that our framework and the default settings successfully allow saccadic redirection with only marginal discomfort for the users.