Comparative Effectiveness of an Omnidirectional Treadmill versus Natural Walking for Navigating in Virtual Environments

Soumyajit Chakraborty ¹, Amanda Kane ², Holly Gagnon ¹, Timothy McNamara ¹, and Bobby Bodenheimer ^{1
1 Vanderbilt University, 2 Belmont University}

Omnidirectional treadmills provide one solution for locomoting through large virtual environments in confined physical spaces. Through two experiments, this paper evaluated locomotion on an omnidirectional treadmill (Cyberith Virtualizer Elite 2) by comparing it to natural walking in an open physical space. In Experiment 1, participants judged distances and completed a path integration task using the treadmill and natural walking. Participants walked further on the treadmill but had larger angular errors during path integration, potentially due to increased cybersickness. Experiment 2 varied path lengths during path integration and found that longer paths led to higher cybersickness scores but did not affect performance. The paper offers interpretations and suggestions for using omnidirectional treadmills in virtual reality.

Amanda presented our paper at the ACM SAP 2024 conference in Dublin, Ireland. Here is the link of the paper. A short overview of the paper can be found in the video below. We also got "Best Paper Honorary Mention Award" for the paper. An image of the award is shown below.