The Virtual Treadmill: A Naturalistic Metaphor for Navigation in Immersive Virtual Environments

This paper describes a metaphor that allows people to move around an immersive virtual environment by “walking in place”. Positional data of participants’ head movements are obtained from a tracking sensor on a head-mounted display during a training session, where they alternate between walking in place and a range of other activities. The data is fed to a neural net pattern recogniser that learns to recognise the person’s walking in place behaviour. This is used in a virtual reality system to allow people to move through the virtual environment by simulating the kinds of kinesthetic actions and sensory perceptions involved in walking. An experiment was carried out to compare this method of navigation with the familiar alternative that involves using a hand-held pointing device, such as a 3D mouse. The experiment suggests that the walking in place method may enhance the participant’s sense of presence, but that it is not advantageous with respect to the efficiency of navigation.