Hallway
More actions
| Hallway | |
|---|---|
| |
| Information | |
| Type | Room-scale |
| Required Devices | None |
| Description | Player walks down a long hallway that rotates slightly with each step, forcing the player to turn to the right and leading them to walk in circles around the play area. |
| Pros | Uses physical walking; designed to keep the player from reaching the edge of the play space |
| Cons | May cause simulator sickness |
| Creator | /u/qwv4851 |
Hallway is an experimental Locomotion Method for room-scale virtual reality in which the player walks down a long virtual hallway while the world slowly rotates with each step. The rotation makes the player compensate by turning to the right, so that in the physical room they walk in circles around the play area and never reach its edge, while in the headset they keep walking down the corridor. The demo is published as a Unity project in the "Movement" repository on GitHub, which its author describes as a "VR Locomotion Demo".[1]
The technique resembles redirected walking, a method first described in academic research in 2001 that rotates the virtual scene around a walking user so that a limited tracked space can hold a much larger virtual environment.[2]
Additional Information
Hallway was its creator's first locomotion experiment. As the player walks down a long hallway, the world slowly rotates with each step. This forces the player to compensate by turning to the right, leading them to walk circles around the play area and never hit the edge of the play space. The creator warns that the demo may cause simulator sickness.
The "Movement" repository was created on 23 May 2016 and received its first commit the same day. A later commit in June 2020 upgraded the project to Unity 2019.3.0f5 and the then-current SteamVR plugin.[1][3] The project uses the SteamVR plugin and the OpenVR API to read the headset and controllers, and it contains several scenes besides Hallway, including a hub scene that the controller menu button returns the player to.[1][4] The repository's original address under the name qwv4851 now redirects to its current location.[1]
How it works
The behavior is implemented in a single script, HallwayController. Every frame it measures how far the tracked headset has moved horizontally since the previous frame, ignoring vertical movement, and moves the player forward along the hallway by that distance multiplied by a speed factor. The script's default speed factor is 6.0. Frame-to-frame jumps larger than a distance threshold (1.0 by default) are ignored; a comment in the code says this filters out the jump that occurs when tracking initializes, along with other headset noise.[5]
The script then calculates the player's clockwise angle relative to the center of the play area bounds and rotates the virtual world by the change in that angle since the demo started.[5] Because the world turns as the player moves around the center of the room, a player who keeps the hallway ahead of them ends up walking a circular path in the physical space, which is the behavior the demo is designed to produce.
Relation to redirected walking
Sharif Razzaque, Zachariah Kohn and Mary C. Whitton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill introduced redirected walking in a short paper at Eurographics 2001. Their technique interactively and imperceptibly rotated the virtual scene about the user so that the user kept walking toward the farthest wall of the lab. The paper notes that, in the extreme, the technique "could cause the user to walk in a large circle in the lab, while she thinks she is walking in a straight line in the virtual environment." The authors cite as inspiration the observation that a blindfolded person told to walk straight veers along an arc, and an earlier 1994 attempt by Michael Moshell and Dan Mapes at the University of Central Florida that was thwarted by simulator sickness and tracker limitations.[2] A 2018 survey of the field describes that first implementation as steering users down a virtual hallway along a predefined path by applying imperceptible rotation gains, while the users were actually walking back and forth within the tracked space.[6]
The same survey sorts redirection into manipulations of the mapping between real and virtual movement and manipulations of the virtual architecture. Among the first kind, translation gains scale the user's forward steps so that a larger virtual environment fits a smaller physical space, and curvature gains are a continuous rotation applied while the user walks forward, which "may allow users to walk infinitely along a virtual path while walking in circles in reality."[6] Hallway's two manipulations are similar to these gains: it scales forward movement with its speed factor, and it rotates the world while the player walks so that a circular physical path corresponds to straight travel down the virtual hallway.[5]
Problems
The creator's own warning is that Hallway may cause simulator sickness. Research on redirected walking reports mixed results on this point. Razzaque and colleagues' 2001 pilot study suggested that redirection did not induce appreciable simulator sickness.[2] The 2018 survey found that later detection-threshold studies, which administered sickness questionnaires before and after exposure, generally indicate an increase in simulator sickness to varying degrees, although it notes that those participants were exposed to both noticeable and imperceptible gains, so the data alone cannot show whether subtle redirection causes sickness.[6]
Hallway's manipulations are also much larger than the detection thresholds measured in research. In psychophysical experiments with 12 subjects, Frank Steinicke and colleagues found that users can be turned physically about 49% more or 20% less than the perceived virtual rotation, that distances can be downscaled by 14% and upscaled by 26%, and that users can be redirected on a circular arc with a radius greater than 22 m while believing they walk straight.[7] Hallway's default speed factor makes each step cover six times its physical length in the virtual world, and the circle it produces must fit inside the physical play area. For comparison, the 2018 survey uses the 4.6 m by 4.6 m tracking space of the first-generation HTC Vive as an example of a small space in which translation gains alone offer limited benefit.[5][6] Walking tight circles also has a cognitive cost in studies of curvature gains: the smaller the circle, the more the technique drew on participants' verbal and spatial working memory, and the authors of that work recommend using curvature gains for cognitively demanding tasks only when the physical space is larger than 10 m by 10 m.[6]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Movement: VR Locomotion Demo". GitHub. 2016-05-23. https://github.com/sereilly/Movement. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Sharif Razzaque, Zachariah Kohn, Mary C. Whitton (2001). "Redirected Walking". Eurographics 2001, Short Presentations. The Eurographics Association. https://doi.org/10.2312/egs.20011036. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ "Commits - sereilly/Movement". GitHub. https://github.com/sereilly/Movement/commits/master. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 "HallwayController.cs - sereilly/Movement". GitHub. https://github.com/sereilly/Movement/blob/master/Assets/Resources/Scripts/HallwayController.cs. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Niels Christian Nilsson, Tabitha Peck, Gerd Bruder, Eric Hodgson, Stefania Serafin, Mary Whitton, Frank Steinicke, Evan Suma Rosenberg (2018). "15 Years of Research on Redirected Walking in Immersive Virtual Environments". IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 44-56. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2018.111125628. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Frank Steinicke, Gerd Bruder, Jason Jerald, Harald Frenz, Markus Lappe (2010). "Estimation of Detection Thresholds for Redirected Walking Techniques". IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 17-27. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.62. Retrieved 2026-09-27.