Improving Experience with a Blink of an Eye.

• Position: VIRTUAL REALITY

In the burgeoning world of virtual reality technology, it remains a challenge to provide users with a realistic perception of infinite space and natural walking capabilities in the VR environment. A team of computer scientists has introduced a new approach to address this problem by leveraging a natural human phenomenon: eye blinks.

Under normal circumstances, all humans are functionally blind for about 10% of the time due to eye blinks and saccades, a rapid movement of the eye between two points or objects. Eye blinks are a common and natural cause of so-called "change blindness:' which indicates the inability for humans to notice changes to visual scenes. Zeroing in on eye blinks and change blindness, the team has devised a novel computational system that effectively redirects the user in the virtual environment during these natural instances, all with undetectable camera movements to deliver orientation redirection.

"Previous RDW [redirected walking] techniques apply rotations continuously while the user is walking, but the amount of unnoticeable rotations is limited:' notes Eike Langbehn, lead author of the research and doctoral candidate at Germany's University of Hamburg. "That's why an...