Walking uphill and downhill

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel redirected walking technique that creates the feeling of walking uphill and downhill in the virtual environment while actually walking on a flat floor in the real world. We focus on the amount of energy consumed while walking uphill and downhill. Previous studies show that walking uphill takes three times as much energy as walking on a flat ground while walking downhill takes only half as much energy. We believe that the walking feeling in the virtual environment could be improved by changing the walking distance according to the gradient and bringing it closer to the energy consumption at the actual ascending and descending walk. We conducted a preliminary experiment to confirm that the proposed method is effective and the experimental results imply that our method is efficient for walking uphill.