  New technologies allow ordinary people to access Virtual Reality at
affordable prices in their homes. One of the most important tasks when
interacting with immersive Virtual Reality is to navigate the virtual
environments (VEs). Arguably, the best methods to accomplish this use of direct
control interfaces. Among those, natural walking (NW) makes for enjoyable user
experience. However, common techniques to support direct control interfaces in
VEs feature constraints that make it difficult to use those methods in cramped
home environments. Indeed, NW requires unobstructed and open space. To approach
this problem, we propose a new virtual locomotion technique, Combined Walking
in Place (CWIP). CWIP allows people to take advantage of the available physical
space and empowers them to use NW to navigate in the virtual world. For longer
distances, we adopt Walking in Place (WIP) to enable them to move in the
virtual world beyond the confines of a cramped real room. However, roaming in
immersive alternate reality, while moving in the confines of a cluttered
environment can lead people to stumble and fall. To approach these problems, we
developed Augmented Virtual Reality (AVR), to inform users about real-world
hazards, such as chairs, drawers, walls via proxies and signs placed in the
virtual world. We propose thus CWIP-AVR as a way to safely explore VR in the
cramped confines of your own home. To our knowledge, this is the first approach
to combined different locomotion modalities in a safe manner. We evaluated it
in a user study with 20 participants to validate their ability to navigate a
virtual world while walking in a confined and cluttered real space. Our results
show that CWIP-AVR allows people to navigate VR safely, switching between
locomotion modes flexibly while maintaining a good immersion.
