The Holodeck Construction Manual.

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality (VR) systems allow users to interact in virtual environments (VEs), where presence is limited to the virtual world; the physical surrounding cannot be perceived. Movie as well as scientific literature have reported about several of these interfaces that enhance presence of users in a VE, for example, the holodeck on the U.S. enterprise. Some of these immersive environments inspired researchers to provide at least a notion of an ultimate display, where the user cannot tell real from virtual [Sutherland 1965]. As shown in Figure 1 (right) in a six-wall CAVE the user is located in a cube on which sides stereoscopic content is projected from the back [Cruz-Neira et al. 1992]. Tracking of the user’s movements can be performed from outside, for example, by infrared-based approaches [Vorozcovs et al. 2005]. The most intuitive way of moving through such a scenario as well as through our real world is to perform real walking. Unfortunately, those setups provide only a limited interaction space in contrast to the potentially infinity VE. However, omnidirectional walking along arbitrary distance is essential for presence in VEs. Therefore, virtual locomotion interfaces are needed that support walking over large distances in the virtual world, while physically remaining within a relatively small space [Usoh et al. 1999]. Many hardware-based approaches have been presented to address this issue [Bouguila et al. 2002; Bouguila and Sato 2002]. Unfortunately, most of them are very costly, while providing only a single user a notion of walking, and thus will probably not get beyond a prototype stage.