Visual capture of gait during redirected walking

Redirected walking allows users of virtual reality applications to explore virtual environments larger than the available physical space. This is achieved by manipulating users’ walking trajectories through visual rotation of the virtual surroundings, without users noticing this manipulation. Apart from its applied relevance, redirected walking is an attractive paradigm to investigate human perception and locomotion. An important yet unsolved question concerns individual differences in the ability to detect redirection. Addressing this question, we administered several perceptual-cognitive tasks to healthy participants, whose thresholds of detecting redirection in a virtual environment were also determined. We report relations between individual thresholds and measures of multisensory weighting (visually-assisted postural stability (Romberg quotient), subjective visual vertical (rod-and-frame test) and illusory self-motion (vection)). The performance in the rod-and-frame test, a classical measure of visual dependency regarding postural information, showed the strongest relation to redirection detection thresholds: The higher the visual dependency, the higher the detection threshold. This supports the interpretation of users’ neglect of redirection manipulations as a “visual capture of gait”. We discuss how future interdisciplinary studies, merging the fields of virtual reality and psychology, may help improving virtual reality applications and simultaneously deepen our understanding of how humans process multisensory conflicts during locomotion.