Geosimulation by Illusion: an Anchorpoint Hypothesis for Redirected Walking Through Expansive Virtual Geographies
Paul Torrens, Ryan Kim, Finley Torrens, Kaishuu Shinozaki-Conefrey
Immersive geosimulation has expanded experimentation to individual spatial behavior by embracing Virtual Reality (VR) as a proxy for embodiment. But, the VR hardware that makes this possible constrains virtual geographies to small, peripheral body-sized spaces, which is problematic for geography experiments at neighborhood-or city-wide scales. An old technique in VR—Redirected Walking (RDW)—addresses a related constraint through perceptual sleights of hand that redirect users’ attention during scenegraph update cycles, allowing simulations to render large spaces for comparatively small and subtle user movement. Key, in RDW, is to redirect users into close-form sinuous turning movements at body-scale, while manipulating their perception to make locomotion seem linear at environmental scales. Traditionally, RDW is deployed in fast-paced and dynamic action scenes (e.g., video games), where redirects as adjustments to overt reorientation can be quickly forgotten by the user in spatial memory. However, in immersive geosimulation, preserving and maintaining a continuous, unbroken spatial cognition with lasting memory-to-cognition reinforcement (as real-world experience) is often a design goal, and RDW runs the risk of breaking the illusion of virtual spatial behavior as embodiment. To retain the benefits of RDW’s ability to unfold spaces, while preserving high-fidelity spatial cognition, we introduce Geographically Redirected Walking (G-RDW), a RDW system for dynamic urban-scale geosimulation that preserves users’ locomotion and interaction during overt reorientation. We show that illusions based upon theoretical concepts from the anchorpoint hypothesis of the 1980s can be used to map computational facets of redirection to counterpart behavioral geography, and that both can be maintained in G-RDW as spatial manifolds, while simultaneously preserving faithful priority to continuity of spatial behavior. In doing so, we reason that there are promising opportunities to examine traditional concepts from behavioral geography, anew, in immersive geosimulation, particularly the perceptual anchoring effects of geographic feature-spaces and time geography of events as control points in understanding dynamic geographic phenomena and processes, with the individual at their center.