Flotation Simulation in a Cable-driven Virtual Environment – A Study with Parasailing

This paper presents flotation simulation in a cable-driven virtual environment. For this, a virtual parasailing system was developed, where the visual stimulus was provided through a VR headset and the physical stimulus was given by wires. In order to prevent the user from moving out of the limited workspace of the cable-driven system, the visual acceleration was washout-filtered to produce the physical acceleration. In the parasailing trajectory, we focused on the stages of vertical acceleration/deceleration and conducted an experiment to identify how much gain can be applied to the visual acceleration, which makes the user feel the natural self-motion when integrated with physical stimulus. Then, the results were tested using several types of full-course virtual parasailing. The results showed that fairly large differences between visual and physical stimuli would be accepted and different gains could be assigned depending on the user’s altitudes.