Introducing FIVE: a framework for Flexible, Interactive, Virtual Environments
Impossible and flexible spaces have been developed for virtual reality (VR) to increase the amount of virtual space that can be condensed into a physical one, doing so by selectively shifting and scaling parts of a virtual environment (VE). Currently, these techniques only work for the specific dimensions of the lab they were created in, as scaling the VE to fit other physical spaces would result in the distortion - namely squashing and stretching - of objects within the VE. In this paper, we introduce a framework for VR environments inspired by the responsive web design paradigm: just as elements on a web page are resized and rearranged to fit different screen sizes, the FIVE framework allows developers to define how objects in a VE will be resized and relocated to fit different physical spaces. This framework has been implemented into the Unity real-time development platform in order to gauge its practical viability. The framework is now ready for a user study which is the next step in allowing impossible and flexible spaces to be used in a wider range of VR applications.
