DreamWalker: Substituting Real-World Walking Experiences with a Virtual Reality

We explore a future in which people spend considerably more time in virtual reality, even during moments when walk between locations in the real world. We present DreamWalker, a VR system that enables such real-world walking while users explore large virtual environments in a headset. Provided with a real-world destination, DreamWalker finds a similar path in a preauthored VR environment and then guides the user's real-walking VR. DreamWalker's tracking system fuses GPS locations, inside-out tracking, and RGBD frames to 1) continuously and accurately position the user in the real world, 2) sense walkable paths and obstacles in real time, and 3) represent paths through a dynamically changing scene in VR to redirect the user towards the chosen destination. We show DreamWalker's versatility through users walking three paths across a large campus while enjoying preauthored VR worlds, supplemented with a variety of obstacle avoidance and redirection techniques. In our evaluation, 8 participants walked through campus on a 15-minute route, experiencing virtual Manhattan full of animated cars, people, and other objects.