Evaluation of Walking in Place on a Wii Balance Board to Explore a Virtual Environment

In this work, we present a method of Walking In Place (WIP) on the Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board to explore a virtual environment. We directly compare our method to joystick locomotion and normal walking. The joystick proves inferior to physically walking and to WIP on the Wii Balance Board (WIP-Wii). Interestingly, we find that physically exploring an environment on foot is equivalent in terms of spatial orientation to exploring an environment using our WIP-Wii method. This implies that the WIP-Wii is a good inexpensive alternative to exploring a virtual environment and it may be well-suited for exploring large virtual environments.