Odin's Helmet

Virtual Reality (VR) experiences have massively improved in the mediation of feedback. However, the simulation of forces is still limited. This paper presents Odin's Helmet, a head-worn device to simulate g-forces that act on the human head in real-life situations. Odin's Helmet uses four head-mounted propellers as actuators to simulate g-forces through pushing and pulling the user's head while being immersed in VR. Odin's Helmet's goal is to increase presence and manipulate the user's perception of the otolith organ in the vestibular system. The user's perception will be tricked to experience a sensation of self-movement in VR. A technical evaluation shows Odin's Helmet's applicability to apply perceivable g-forces to the user's head. We conclude with future use cases of Odin's Helmet, such as redirected walking by controlling the user's head orientation, attention guidance, and wind simulations through Odin's Helmet.

Interaction Based Redirected Walking

With a significant improvement in virtual reality (VR) devices, the number of interaction-based applications for consumers and industrial products is naturally increasing. As a result, many people can use VR in their homes or offices where they are limited by the physical tracking space. One way to overcome this limitation of natural walking is to use perception-inspired locomotion techniques such as redirected walking (RDW). RDW utilizes imperfections of human perception to introduce small changes like rotations or translations to steer the user away from the tracking boundaries. In this work we evaluate the detection threshold for discrete manipulation rotations to reorient the users in the scene during interactions. We show the thresholds of five most common interactions (Looking, Picking Up, Throwing, Shooting and Sword Fighting) that can be used as a distraction for RDW, which was confirmed in a user study. Based on the findings we propose a novel steer-to-action technique that helps game developers to improve VR games experiences.