DOI number:  10.1109/TVCG.2023.3251648

Affiliation of Author(s):  YMSC, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Journal:  IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Funded by:  NSFC (62132012); Tsinghua-Tencent Joint Lab and Marsden/Royal Society NZ (MFP-20-VUW-180)

Key Words:  Redirected walking; Multi-user; Online VR; Fairness

Abstract:  With the recent rise of Metaverse, online multiplayer VR applications are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. However, as multiple users are located in different physical environments, different reset frequencies and timings can lead to serious fairness issues for online collaborative/competitive VR applications. For the fairness of online VR apps/games, an ideal online RDW strategy must make the locomotion opportunities of different users equal, regardless of different physical environment layouts. The existing RDW methods lack the scheme to coordinate multiple users in different PEs, and thus have the issue of triggering too many resets for all the users under the locomotion fairness constraint. We propose a novel multi-user RDW method that is able to significantly reduce the overall reset number and give users a better immersive experience by providing a fair exploration. Our key idea is to first find out the "bottleneck" user that may cause all users to be reset and estimate the time to reset given the users' next targets, and then redirect all the users to favorable poses during that maximized bottleneck time to ensure the subsequent resets can be postponed as much as possible. More particularly, we develop methods to estimate the time of possibly encountering obstacles and the reachable area for a specific pose to enable the prediction of the next reset caused by any user. Our experiments and user study found that our method outperforms existing RDW methods in online VR applications.

Note:  Funding: National Natural Science Foundation of China (62132012); Tsinghua-Tencent Joint Laboratory for Internet Innovation Technology and Marsden Fund Council managed by Royal Society of New Zealand (MFP-20-VUW-180); Other ISSNs: 1941-0506, 2160-9306

Co-author:  Jia-Hong Liu,Miao Wang,Fang-Lue Zhang

First Author:  Sen-Zhe Xu

Indexed by:  Journal Article

Correspondence Author:  Song-Hai Zhang

Discipline:  Engineering

Document Type:  J

Volume:  30

Issue:  4

Page Number:  1916–1926

ISSN No.:  1077-2626

Translation or Not:  no

Links to published journals:  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10058042/