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Comment by gwillen | Hacker News Reader

I will be very curious what the minimum area requirement for the game is. I can't imagine redirected walking being very convincing in the Quest's minimum 6.5 x 6.5 ft square.

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I've played around in Tea For God (https://sidequestvr.com/app/65/tea-for-god-under-development) which does this on the quest, and it works really well, and I didn't even use the full 6.5'x6.5' (in my case ~6'x4') possible. Within a minute I lost all sense of where I was in the real world.

Tea For God does not use redirected walking. It procedurally adopts game space to available room space, and uses clever mechanisms like non-euclidian geometry and various elevators to allow for huge worlds. Still, movement is 1:1 mapped between room and game.

Redirected walking means distorting the mapping when moving or rotating, to fit any game world into limited playing space. In research it's always applied in larger spaces, x5 times bigger than living rooms. If you distort moving or turning too much, users lose balance or become nauseous.

Here's a decent intro paper. 15 Years of Research on Redirected Walking in Immersive Virtual Environments https://illusioneering.cs.umn.edu/papers/nilsson-cga2018.pdf

Hi, I'm the lead dev on walking dream. It's hard to say right now what the "minimum area requirement" is, because there's an inverse correlation between area size and nausea (since more "redirecting" is needed in smaller spaces) However, I think it works pretty well in 9x9ft so far (but we need to see how it works for other testers)

I agree that 6.5ft^2 is probably too small for a good RDW experience based on the gain numbers I'm familiar with. The tracked volumes of the experiments I was a part of were all on the scale of ~15-20 ft square. (I'm not a researcher, really, but I was a developer at a lab that did some RDW research -- for instance, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2931002.2931018). There are some tricks that the literature suggests could help (forcing the user to turn >360 degrees in place, exploiting change blindness to get people to accept non-euclidean spaces, etc) but I believe it's not controversial to assert that the user is going to realize they're not walking straight if someone tries to get them to walk a circle with radius ~3ft with traditional RDW cues!

I'm the lead dev on Walking Dream: No doubt the player will "notice" they are being redirected in a small space, the question is if it's bad enough to induce nausea. Our goal is to be able to tell the player "you can just walk wherever you want in the game, but you'll notice some weird rotational shifting, however you won't get nausea". It's a lower bar that can still lead to fun gameplay.

(2m × 2m if you're curious)

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