User Mobility Simulator for Full-Immersive Multiuser Virtual Reality with Redirected Walking

Abstract

Full-immersive multiuser Virtual Reality (VR) setups envision supporting seamless mobility of the VR users in the virtual worlds, while simultaneously constraining them inside shared physical spaces through redirected walking. For enabling high data rate and low latency delivery of video content in such setups, the supporting wireless networks will have to utilize highly directional communication links, where these links will ideally have to "track" the mobile VR users for maintaining the Line-of-Sight (LoS) connectivity. The design decisions about the mobility patterns of the VR users in the virtual worlds will thus have a substantial effect on the mobility of these users in the physical environments, and therefore also on performance of the underlying networks. Hence, there is a need for a tool that can provide a mapping between design decisions about the users' mobility in the virtual words, and their effects on the mobility in constrained physical setups. To address this issue, we have developed and in this paper present a simulator for enabling this functionality. Given a set of VR users with their virtual movement trajectories, the outline of the physical deployment environment, and a redirected walking algorithm for avoiding physical collisions, the simulator is able to derive the physical movements of the users. Based on the derived physical movements, the simulator can capture a set of performance metrics characterizing the number of perceivable resets and the distances between such resets for each user. The simulator is also able to indicate the predictability of the physical movement trajectories, which can serve as an indication of the complexity of supporting a given virtual movement pattern by the underlying networks.