Redirected walking techniques enable natural locomotion through immersive virtual environments (VEs) that are larger than the real world workspace. Most existing techniques rely upon manipulating the mapping between physical and virtual motions while the layout of the environment remains constant. However, if the primary focus of the experience is on the virtual world's content, rather than on its spatial layout, then the goal of redirected walking can be achieved through an entirely different strategy. In this paper, we introduce flexible spaces -a novel redirection technique that enables infinite real walking in virtual environments that do not require replication of real world layouts. Flexible spaces overcome the limitations and generalize the use of overlapping (impossible) spaces and change blindness by employing procedural layout generation. Our approach allows VE designers to focus on the content of the virtual world independent of the implementation details imposed by real walking, thereby making spatial manipulation techniques more practical for use in a variety of application domains.

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In practice, real-world physical workspaces and technological limitations restrict the free and unlimited exploration of an arbitrary large-scale virtual environment. This article provides an overview of the existing approaches and techniques for enlarging the walkable virtual space. The authors specifically focus on the methods that use spatial manipulation for spatial compression because it is one of the most promising, but underexplored methods for nonintrusive user redirection in a limited physical space.