Feature Guided Path Redirection for VR Navigation

Path redirection for virtual reality (VR) navigation allows the user to explore a large virtual environment (VE) while the VR application is hosted in a limited physical space. Static mapping redirection methods deform the virtual scene to fit the physical space. The challenge is to deform the virtual scene in a reasonable way, making the distortions friendly to the user's visual perception. In this paper we propose a feature-guided path redirection method that finds and takes into account the visual features of 3D virtual scenes. In a first offline step, a collection of view-independent and view-dependent visual features of the VE are extracted and stored in a visual feature map. Then, in a second offline step, the navigation path is deformed to fit in the confines of the available physical space through a mass-spring system optimization, according to distortion sensitive factors derived from the visual feature map. Finally, a novel detail preserving rendering algorithm is employed to preserve the original visual detail as the user navigates the VE on the redirected path. We tested our method on several scenes, where our method showed a reduced VE 3D mesh distortion, when compared to the path redirection methods without feature guidance.