Inclination Manipulator

This study aims to use the redirected walking technique that makes users of virtual reality systems feel like they are walking on an inclined surface while actually walking on a flat one in a real space. However, when the appearance of the virtual inclination becomes too significant, the absence of rotational force components applied to the body causes a feeling of incongruity. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to effectively manipulate the perception of inclination of a virtual walking surface using haptic cues to complement the rotational force components. Based on this approach, we developed a system to generate the rotational force components by loading a weight at the user’s back, which shifts when the configuration of virtual inclination changes. The experiments conducted using the proposed system verified the feasibility of our approach.