Navigating Larger Spaces in 3D Virtual Environments

Abstract

Human-Computer Interaction has attracted a lot of researchers in the recent past, having 3D Interaction as a prominent aspect of itself. The realization of virtual environments, and 3D environments in particular, has unarguably opened up a greater set of opportunities, thereby emerging out as an extensively researched domain. However, it has posed certain challenges to be addressed, with one of the most critical ones being navigation. Navigation in virtual environments is one of the primitive tasks in 3D interaction. As of the state of the art, there are numerous approaches currently being used for navigating in a virtual environment. However, most of them tend to break the sense of realism, and therefore turn out to be ineffective from a user experience standpoint. Although the hardware solutions to navigation try to solve these issues, they instead have other drawbacks that eventually make them infeasible to be adopted on a large scale. This is where the motivation behind our work comes from. In this paper, we briefly discuss the problem of navigation and the current approaches to it that are being employed. Further, we present a novel approach to navigate larger spaces in 3D virtual environments, which is inspired by demos and games pertaining to the Non-Euclidean World.