Adobe Researchers Use Eye Tracking To Create 'Infinite' VR Spaces

One of the biggest challenges of Virtual Reality, is mapping the experience of exploring the simulated world the user is experiencing, onto the real world in which their body is moving around.  While one can incorporate a real world obstacle into the simulation, this is difficult to do without disrupting the immersive quality of the experience.  Furthermore, some obstacles don't lend themselves very well to this, such as the walls of the room the user is in at that moment.  How does one map a large virtual space, onto a small real space, without the user noticing?

Researchers from Adobe believe they have solved this issue now, with a new type of VR System that combined environmental awareness, such as awareness of where physical obstacles are located in the room, with subtle adjustments to the visual perspective synchronized with quick, unconscious eye movements.  The result is an artificial environment which adaptively navigates the users in such a way that not only do they avoid walking into obstacles within a room, but even the limits of the room itself go unnoticed, such that one may explore a vast virtual city from the confines of a typical office or even apartment room.

Fans of the Star Trek franchise will recognize this as roughly equivalent to how the Federation Holodecks allow users to feel like they are in a vast open space, from within the confines of what is, in fact, a fairly small cubical room.

The Researchers claim that most users cannot tell a superficial difference between this adjusted simulated space, and a more conventional unadjusted virtual space (i.e. they don't experience the adjusted space as 'less real' or less immersive than the adjusted one), and that it does not create nausea or other issues typical of VR usage.

#VR #VirtualReality #EyeTracking