Toward virtual stair walking

This paper presents a motion remapping-based locomotion technique. Our technique can provide a realistic sensation of climbing and descending stairs when users navigate the virtual environment on foot. The main contribution is to provide users a realistic experience of walking up and down virtual stairs while in reality, they are walking on a flat surface. When a user lifts their real foot, our technique controls the position of virtual foot in order to match the timing of real foot touching the floor with that of virtual foot touching the stairs. The avatar’s head and waist are also controlled to mimic the height change movements of stair walking. To achieve this, we collected the actual motion data beforehand and then designed our locomotion technique using the data. Then, we conducted an experiment and an application test. In the experiment, we identified how much visual gain should be applied to foot motion to induce a realistic sensation of stair walking. The results demonstrated that applying visual gains of 1.193 and 0.822 to motions of climbing and descending the stairs were accepted as the most realistic, respectively. In the application test, we investigated whether the proposed technique successfully increases the user’s perceived presence and provides a positive user experience. The results demonstrated that the user’s perceived presence was significantly enhanced when we applied visual gains. The results also showed that participants felt as if they were walking on the stairs in the virtual environment without experiencing discomfort or postural instability. As the proposed technique only needs visual cue control, we expect that it can easily be applied to commercial applications .