FREE-RDW: A Multi-user Redirected Walking Method for Supporting Non-forward Steps

Multi-user redirected walking (RDW) is widely used in large-scale virtual scenes because it allows more users to move synchronously in both virtual and physical environments. To ensure the freedom of virtual roaming, which can be used in various situations, some redirected algorithms have been dedicated to non-forward movements, such as vertical movement and jumping. However, the existing RDW methods still mainly focus on forward steps, ignoring sideward and backward steps, which are also common and necessary in virtual reality. RDW algorithms for non-forward steps can enrich the movement direction of users' virtual roaming and improve the realism of VR roaming. In addition, the non-forward motions have a larger curvature gain, which can be used to better reduce resets in RDW. Therefore, this paper presents a new method of multi-user redirected walking for supporting non-forward steps (FREE-RDW), which adds the options of sideward and backward steps to extend the VR locomotion. Our method adopts a user collision avoidance strategy based on optimal reciprocal collision avoidance (ORCA) and optimizes it into a linear programming problem to obtain the optimal velocity for users. Furthermore, our method uses APF to expose the user to repulsive forces from other users and walls, thus further reducing potential collisions and improving the utilization of physical space. The experiments show that our method performs well in virtual scenes with forward and non-forward steps. In addition, our method can significantly reduce the number of resets compared with reactive RDW algorithms such as DDB-RDW and APF-RDW in multi-user forward-step virtual scenes.