Using Redirection to Create a Swimming Experience in VR for the Sitting Position

As a primary locomotion method for some VR applications (e.g. diving, physical exercise, etc.), swimming creates an immersive and entertaining experience. Existing VR swimming methods often use complex and expensive setups to fix users in the mid-air to restore prone positions. While these methods provide realistic experiences, the hanging postures place an additional burden on the users and make them difficult to freely switch between the two swimming positions (prone and supine). Using redirection technology, we propose a new, easy, and effective method to simulate swimming in a comfortable sitting position. For visual simulation, this method redirects the -30° to 30° torso tilt range of the pitch axis in a sitting position to -90° to 90° through a rotation gain to the user’s view. For vestibular and proprioceptive simulation, we use the swimming action, the torso forward/backward leaning for swimming postures’ (backstroke and breaststroke) switching, the pillow and seat back for simulating the buoyancy of water. Preliminary experimental results show that our swimming method can create a good swimming experience for seated users.