Enabling Unconstrained Omnidirectional Walking Through Virtual Environments: An Overview of the CyberWalk Project - Human Walking in Virtual Environments - page 111

Chapter 6
Enabling Unconstrained Omnidirectional
Walking Through Virtual Environments:
An Overview of the CyberWalk Project

Ilja Frissen, Jennifer L. Campos, Manish Sreenivasa and Marc O.Ernst

Abstract The CyberWalk treadmill is the first truly omnidirectional treadmill of its
size that allows for near natural walking through arbitrarily large Virtual Environ-
ments. The platform represents advances in treadmill and virtual reality technology
and engineering, but it is also a major step towards having a single setup that allows
the study of human locomotion and its many facets. This chapter focuses on the
human behavioral research that was conducted to understand human locomotion
from the perspective of specifying design criteria for the CyberWalk. The first part
of this chapter describes research on the biomechanics of human walking, in partic-

( B ) . · M. Sreenivasa · M. O. Ernst
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Multisensory Perception and Action Group,
Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: [e-mail]
I. Frissen
LUNAM Université, CNRS, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, IRCCyN (Institut de Recherche en
Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes), 1 rue de la Noë, BP 92101,
44321 Nantes Cedex 3, France
J. L. Campos
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Multisensory Perception and Action Group,
Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: [e-mail]
J. L. Campos
iDAPT, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
J. L. Campos
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M. Sreenivasa
Nakamura Laboratory, Department of Mechano-Informatics, University of Tokyo,
Tokyo, Japan
e-mail: [e-mail]
M. O. Ernst
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
e-mail: [e-mail]

I. Frissen