Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. Patrick Baudisch
 

Scenograph: Fitting Real-Walking VR Experiences into Various Tracking Volumes

When developing a real-walking virtual reality experience, creators generally design virtual locations to fit a specific tracking volume. Unfortunately, this prevents the resulting experience from running on a smaller or differently shaped tracking volume. To address this, we present a software system called Scenograph. The core of Scenograph is a tracking volume-independent representation of real-walking experiences. Scenograph instantiates the experience to a tracking volume of given size and shape by splitting the locations into smaller ones while maintaining narrative structure. In our user study, participants’ ratings of realism decreased significantly when existing techniques were used to map a 25m2 experience to 9m2 and an L-shaped 8m2 tracking volume. In contrast, ratings did not differ when Scenograph was used to instantiate the experience.

(a) Traditionally, designers of real-walking VR experiences have specific tracking volumes in mind. This rendition of the fairy tale ‘Goldilocks’ consists of three 25m2 locations filled with interactive assets. Users change locations using corridors as portals [26]. Unfortunately, specifying the tracking volume prevents the experience from running on smaller tracking volumes. (b) Scenograph addresses this through a tracking volume-independent representation of real-walking experiences. This allows Scenograph to instantiate experiences for tracking volumes of different size and shape. Here we used Scenograph to map ‘Goldilocks’ to an L-shaped 8m2 space. While maintaining the narrative structure, it splits the three locations into six smaller ones, each fitting the new tracking volume.

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