The WalkingSeat: A Leaning Interface for Locomotion in Virtual Environments

When users experience immersive Virtual Reality (VR), the limited physical space available can become a significant problem when they use their real walk to navigate the virtual environment (VE). To address this limitation, various interfaces and metaphors have been proposed that combine different user inputs ranging from controllers, gestures, and body tracking. However, not all of these solutions are natural and intuitive, reducing the level of immersion and presence in VR. In this paper, we present Walking Seat (WS), a novel leaning interface (LI) for locomotion in VEs that the user can operate while seated. The main objective of this work is to design an interface that provides an intuitive and immersive locomotion experience. The WS interface uses pressure mapping and a gyroscope to track the user’s upper body tilt and waist orientation. The WS interface has been thoroughly evaluated, using an articulated locomotion testbed and compared its performance with three non-leaning interfaces previously tested with the same reference protocol. The experimental results suggest that the WS interface could be a promising solution for navigation in immersive VR applications and open new directions for further research to refine and improve the WS interface for more complex tasks and scenarios.