Microsoft’s DreamWalker VR turns your daily commute into a totally different one

Enlarge / A user traverses a park while wearing a DreamWalker kit. (credit: Microsoft)

Researchers at Microsoft have developed new VR technologies that they claim allow users to remain fully immersed in a virtual world even while traversing public places in the real world on foot.

Microsoft describes the project, titled DreamWalker, as “a method for allowing people to safely navigate a given route in real-world environments, such as a daily walk to work, while seeing themselves strolling a different VR world, such as a city of their choosing.” It was developed by researchers Jackie Yang, Eyal Ofek, Andy Wilson, and Christian Holz.

The company’s research division published a blog post about the new research yesterday, and researchers will present the method at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology tomorrow.