Video: Virtual environment makes space seem endless

Is this a stair I see before me? (Image: Floris Leeuwenberg/The Cover Story/Corbis)

STEP into the labyrinth. Imagine physically wandering through the many rooms and corridors of an endless maze, never seeing the same place twice – but without actually leaving your living room.

This is the promise of a new virtual reality (VR) system. It works by tracking the body and head movements of a person wearing a VR headset and guides them through endless sets of virtual spaces as they pace around within a real physical space. The trick is that, in the virtual world, the corridors and rooms are generated automatically as the walker moves to always fit inside the real space available. There is potentially no end to the environment, just like a huge video game.

The illusion created by the VR system is strong enough that people trying it do not realise that they are effectively walking around in circles. “People think they are walking in much larger environments. We can simulate rooms connected by corridors, and we could simulate outdoor areas in which certain areas are restricted,” says Hannes Kaufmann of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, who worked on the system.


“The illusion is so strong that people don’t realise they are effectively walking around in circles”

Using treadmills would risk ruining the illusion, but it can be boosted by prompting people to test the reality of their virtual cage when they are next to a real wall. “People would try to walk through the virtual wall when they are right next to the real wall,” says Hannes. “If people do this once they will never do it again.”

The next step is to add more than one person into the mix, and tweak how the environment is generated so that people can meet simultaneously in the virtual and real world and not bump into each other as they navigate around. The idea was presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference in Orlando, Florida, last week.

Victor Mateevitsi, at the University of Illinois in Chicago says the system could help bring VR out of labs and into homes.

Kaufmann envisions it creating sprawling virtual museum spaces inside a limited physical space. “In the morning you could walk into the Guggenheim and in the afternoon explore the Taj Mahal,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Virtual reality transforms a room into an infinite space”