ABSTRACT
An immersive virtual environment portrays a scene that changes in response to a person’s actions to give that person the impression of dealing directly with the -dimensional simulated world. Virtual contact is the interactive simulation of physical contact to allow users’ avatars to interact with purely virtual objects in ways similar to how they interact with physical objects. Gaiter is a locomotion interaction technique in which a person walks in place to walk through the virtual world. The horizontal excursion and rate of in-place steps are mapped into the stride length and cadence of virtual steps. A new approach to virtual contact under development will present a more detailed picture of the way the avatar’s body is constrained, which should provide more facility to the user and more information to other teammates about what the user is doing.
