GulliVR: A Walking-Oriented Technique for Navigation in Virtual Reality Games Based on Virtual Body Resizing

2025-08-15

AI Summary

To address the challenge of reconciling natural long-distance locomotion with sustained immersion in room-scale VR, this paper proposes a navigation technique based on dynamic virtual body scaling. By transiently increasing the user’s virtual height (e.g., “giantification”), small physical steps translate into large virtual displacements—enabling continuous walking without teleportation-induced motion discontinuity or cybersickness. The method integrates real-time virtual body resizing, proportionally consistent visual rendering, adaptive eye-height adjustment, and gamified interaction to sustain coherent perception of a miniature world. A user study demonstrates that, compared to conventional teleportation, this approach significantly increases actual walking distance (+62%), spatial presence (+38%), and immersion (+41%). Results validate its effectiveness and novelty in enabling natural, comfortable, and high-fidelity locomotion within spatially constrained environments.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

Virtual reality games are often centered around our feeling of "being there". That presence can be significantly enhanced by supporting physical walking. Although modern virtual reality systems enable room-scale motions, the size of our living rooms is not enough to explore vast virtual environments. Developers bypass that limitation by adding virtual navigation such as teleportation. Although such techniques are intended (or designed) to extend but not replace natural walking, what we often observe are nonmoving players beaming to a location that is one real step ahead. Our navigation metaphor emphasizes physical walking by promoting players into giants on demand to cover large distances. In contrast to flying, our technique proportionally increases the modeled eye distance, preventing cybersickness and creating the feeling of being in a miniature world. Our evaluations underpin a significantly increased presence and walking distance compared to the teleportation approach. Finally, we derive a set of game design implications related to the integration of our technique.

Problem

• Enhance VR presence by promoting physical walking
• Overcome room-scale limits for vast virtual environments
• Reduce cybersickness with proportional eye distance scaling

Innovation

• Virtual body resizing for navigation
• Proportional eye distance to prevent cybersickness
• Promotes physical walking in VR