There is a lot of scientific evidence that natural walking is the most advantageous locomotion technique for Virtual Reality. It does not induce motion sickness (as gamepad controls often do), it does not make the user disoriented (as teleportation often does), and it does increase the user‘s sense of presence. Unfortunately, natural walking in VR is limited by the available tracking space.

We develop a tool which can be used to enable natural walking in VR experiences (games or other applications), even if there is only a space of e.g. 4x4 meters available. For this, a collection of VR locomotion techniques called Redirected Walking (RDW) is used that enables humans to walk on paths in the real world, which may vary from the paths they perceive in the virtual world. RDW can be implemented by manipulations applied to the displayed scene, usually by using redirection gains, which force the user to compensate by repositioning and/or reorienting themselves in order to maintain their intended walking direction in the virtual world. Within certain detection thresholds such manipulations cannot be noticed by the user.

There are a bunch of RDW techniques that were developed and evaluated, mainly in academic research, e.g. translation gains, rotation gains, curvature gains, bending gains, impossible spaces, flexible spaces, distractors, change blindness based illusions, etc. Some of them were invented by our team members who were researchers at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
We will bundle these techniques in an engine plugin, so they can be integrated in the VR experience directly when a scene is created. This plugin will be available for Unity and Unreal Engine at least.