Redirected Walking: VR Locomotion Gain

Walk (hold)

Redirection gains

Rotation gain g_R 1.00×

Translation gain g_T 1.00×

Curvature radius r 7.5 m

Steer-to-center

Live state

Below detection threshold

Dist. to physical wall

2.50 m

Hidden rotation

0.0 °/s

Physical steps

0.0 m

Virtual distance felt

0.0 m

How it works

Redirected walking (RDW) lets someone walk freely through a large virtual space while their real body stays inside a small tracked room. A controller subtly scales the mapping between real and virtual motion using three gains:

Rotation gain:    g_R = Δvirtual_turn / Δphysical_turn
Translation gain: g_T = Δvirtual_dist / Δphysical_dist
Curvature gain:   g_C = 1 / r   (r = physical turn radius, m)
                  while the user perceives walking dead straight

Here your on-screen keys drive the real body: holding turn rotates you physically, holding walk moves you physically at a fixed pace. The engine reports back a virtual heading and distance scaled by g_R and g_T — turn gain above 1× makes a small real turn read as a big virtual turn (and vice versa). While walking straight, an extra physical rotation of ω_C = v_phys/r is injected into your real heading but not into the virtual one, silently curving your physical path along a circle of radius r without changing what you see.

Steer-to-center aims that hidden curvature toward the middle of the physical room, keeping you off the walls indefinitely; switch it off to see a constant, one-directional curvature drift you into a wall instead.
Human-perception studies (Steinicke et al., 2010) found these gains are usually imperceptible for g_R ≈ 0.8–1.49, g_T ≈ 0.86–1.26, and r ≳ 7.5 m — the status pill above checks your current sliders against that window.
This is the technique VR education/training labs use to let a student "walk" a building-sized virtual environment inside an ordinary classroom footprint.

Physical room (real body) Virtual room (what you see)

PHYSICALVIRTUAL

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