Large Virtual Worlds Research Articles

Metaverse: Shaping Tomorrow's Virtual Reality Landscape In The Era Of Imagination

The concept of the Metaverse has emerged with the advancement of technology as a revolutionary environment in which carefully designed virtual reality (VR) landscapes provide previously unheard-of chances for human creation and involvement. The Metaverse is expected to have significant impacts on the virtual world of the future in the age of creativity. The Metaverse is an ever-changing virtual universe, where immersive landscapes are created that are only constrained by human innovation, extending beyond the limitations of physical reality. People may create and explore large virtual worlds in this domain, obfuscating the distinction between the digital and physical worlds. The Metaverse is a collaborative and inventive platform that is created by combining cutting-edge technology with human ingenuity. In the Metaverse, creating virtual reality landscapes is a creative process where artists use state-of-the-art resources and platforms to realize their ideas. The possibilities are limitless, fostering a resurgence of imagination and creativity in anything from expansive metropolises to fanciful worlds. Furthermore, the Metaverse enables smooth communication and interaction, bringing people together in common virtual areas from all over the world and encouraging new kinds of social interaction and cooperation.

“I Feel My Abs”: Exploring Non-standing VR Locomotion

Virtual Reality (VR) games and experiences predominantly have the users interact while standing or seated. However, this only represents a fraction of the full diversity of human movement. In this paper, we explore a novel non-standing approach to VR locomotion where the user performs locomotion movements in the air or only slightly touching the ground with their feet. For instance, the user may lie supine on the ground, reminiscent of the Bicycle Crunch, a core training movement common in Pilates and other forms of bodyweight exercise. Although this cannot generally replace traditional VR locomotion, it provides two benefits that we believe can be of use for specific application domains such as VR exergames: First, the user's lower body movement is not impeded by a small real-life space, allowing versatile navigation of large virtual worlds using walking, running, strafing, and jumping. Second, we allow new ways to activate parts of the body that remain passive in most existing VR interactions. We describe and discuss four different variants of the approach, and investigate two prototypes further in a qualitative user study, to better understand their strengths, weaknesses, and application potential.

RETRACTED: Indoor space art design based on immersive VR and embedded system

Indoor space systems are mainly used in outdoor environments, but indoor navigation systems are still under development. This article introduces indoor spatial analysis based on virtual reality to people who help in indoor environments. Work is done with the mechanisms and methods used for storage, dynamic reconstruction, and navigation in 3D virtual space using databases. The characteristics of the room are shown in the database table. The proposed Virtual Reality Environment Modeling (VREM) method is used to create a 3D image to analyze the room space. The client browser requests the virtual world through the server that provides the URL. The selected virtual world and server virtual format is returned to the client. The new 3D simulation embedded system is used to act as an agent for the behavior of simulation embedded system and other objects on the Internet and their associated syntactic structures. This method is first applied to the forward transform 3D to enhance the virtual and reconstructed images of the discrete cosine transform. Effectively view large virtual worlds and easily modify them. The size, shape, or other aspects of the virtual world's elements can be changed by changing the data in the database. Finally, virtual block matching algorithms are applied to analyze virtual indoor components or objects to provide better results than existing methods.

CityGML goes mobile: application of large 3D CityGML models on smartphones

ABSTRACTCityGML, a semantic information model for digital/virtual city models has become quite popular in various scenarios. While the data format is still actively under development, it is already supported by different software solutions, especially GIS-based desktop applications. Mobile systems on the other hand are still neglected, even though the georeferenced objects of CityGML have many application fields, for example, in the currently popular area of location-based Augmented Reality. In this paper we present an independent multi-platform CityGML viewer, its architecture and specific implementation techniques that we use to realize and optimize the process of visualizing CityGML data for use in Augmented Reality. The main focus lies in improving the implementation on mobile devices, such as smartphones, and assessing its usability and performance in comparison to web-based approaches. Due to the constrained hardware resources of smartphones, it is a particular challenge to handle complex 3D objects and large virtual worlds as provided by CityGML, not only in terms of memory and storage space, but also with respect to mobile processing units and display sizes.

Game as text as game: the communicative experience of digital games

We propose to regard video game as text, but not by literally understanding it as a verbal expression, and instead recognizing that many assumptions of literary theory are relevant to its analysis. This option seems to put us in sync with the narratologists, who exalt games as new manifestations of narrative, but cling to a conception of text as world that values illusionist effects. Instead, we are interested in experiences that, against this perspective, recognize the possibility of regarding game as a text that is a game - an incomplete object that is to be updated by the reader in a self-reflective relationship with the signs that compose it, a central notion to theories such as Iser’s and Dewey’s. Then, instead of focusing on strategies of immersion on large virtual worlds, we favor small independent casual games (such as Small Worlds, Grey, The Beggar, and Dys4ia) analyzing how, in these, take place experiences that allow us to re-examine the aesthetic potential of the medium.

Performance of Redirected Walking Algorithms in a Constrained Virtual World

Redirected walking algorithms imperceptibly rotate a virtual scene about users of immersive virtual environment systems in order to guide them away from tracking area boundaries. Ideally, these distortions permit users to explore large unbounded virtual worlds while walking naturally within a physically limited space. Many potential virtual worlds are composed of corridors, passageways, or aisles. Assuming users are not expected to walk through walls or other objects within the virtual world, these constrained worlds limit the directions of travel and as well as the number of opportunities to change direction. The resulting differences in user movement characteristics within the physical world have an impact on redirected walking algorithm performance. This work presents a comparison of generalized RDW algorithm performance within a constrained virtual world. In contrast to previous studies involving unconstrained virtual worlds, experimental results indicate that the steer-to-orbit keeps users in a smaller area than the steer-to-center algorithm. Moreover, in comparison to steer-to-center, steer-to-orbit is shown to reduce potential wall contacts by over 29%.

Optimizing Constrained-Environment Redirected Walking Instructions Using Search Techniques

A goal of redirected walking (RDW) is to allow large virtual worlds to be explored within small tracking areas. Generalized steering algorithms, such as steer-to-center, simply move the user toward locations that are considered to be collision free in most cases. The algorithm developed here, FORCE, identifies collision-free paths by using a map of the tracking area's shape and obstacles, in addition to a multistep, probabilistic prediction of the user's virtual path through a known virtual environment. In the present implementation, the path predictions describe a user's possible movements through a virtual store with aisles. Based on both the user's physical and virtual location / orientation, a search-based optimization technique identifies the optimal steering instruction given the possible user paths. Path prediction uses the map of the virtual world; consequently, the search may propose steering instructions that put the user close to walls if the user's future actions eventually lead away from the wall. Results from both simulated and real users are presented. FORCE identifies collision-free paths in 55.0 percent of the starting conditions compared to 46.1 percent for generalized methods. When considering only the conditions that result in different outcomes, redirection based on FORCE produces collision-free path 94.5 percent of the time.

Enhanced waypoint graph for surface and volumetric path planning in virtual worlds

Our research focuses on the problem of path planning in 3D virtual world applications. The characters we consider are heterogeneous, as they have different sizes, and can perform surface or volumetric motion. In this paper, we propose an enhanced waypoint graph, which consists of point nodes equipped with radius, as well as edges connecting those nodes. Each edge is labeled with the motion type it can support. Given a polygon soup representation of a virtual world, the proposed algorithm starts by subdividing the virtual world into regions. This enables us to process large virtual worlds. Each region is then locally voxelized, one at a time. Two kinds of waypoints are generated: local waypoints using corner detection on the voxelization, and border waypoints at the region boundary. Waypoints are then sparsely connected to form a local waypoint graph, and local graphs are finally connected via the border waypoints to create the final global enhanced waypoint graph. To plan paths between arbitrary points using this graph, the points are connected to the graph using nearest neighbor search and traversability test, then Dijkstra/A* algorithm is used to calculate the final path, taking into account the appropriate size and motion type.

Implementing artificial intelligence: a generic approach with software support

In computer games, one of the eminent trends is to create large virtual worlds with numerous non-player characters. Usually their artificial intelligence (AI) is implemented by scripting, which can be a burden for the application developers involved. This paper suggests an approach facilitating designing AI functionalities and striving to reduce, via software tool support, the amount of hand-written AI script code needed. Our approach is suitable for, e.g., creating autonomous agents with personal characteristics, capable of behaving in a natural manner. For instance, the goal-oriented agent paradigm can be applied easily with the approach. The definitions needed are written using a script language. Therefore, the agent configurations can be tested rapidly. We have extended an existing AI environment and created a script framework for implementing general-purpose AIs. Moreover, we have implemented software tools capable of generating script code for helping in the AI structure design and for simplifying the actual code-writing task. For demonstrating the applicability of our approach, three example scenarios specialized from the framework are presented.

Multi‐core scalable and efficient pathfinding with Parallel Ripple Search

ABSTRACTGame developers are often faced with very demanding requirements on huge numbers of agents moving naturally through increasingly large and detailed virtual worlds. With the advent of multi‐core architectures, new approaches to accelerate expensive pathfinding operations are worth being investigated. Traditional single‐processor pathfinding strategies, such as A* and its derivatives, have been long praised for their flexibility. We implemented several parallel versions of such algorithms to analyze their intrinsic behavior, concluding that they have a large overhead, yield far from optimal paths, do not scale up to many cores or are cache unfriendly. In this article, we propose Parallel Ripple Search, a novel parallel pathfinding algorithm that largely solves these limitations. It utilizes a high‐level graph to assign local search areas to CPU cores at “equidistant” intervals. These cores then use A* flooding behavior to expand towards each other, yielding good “guesstimate points” at border touch on. The process does not rely on expensive parallel programming synchronization locks but instead relies on the opportunistic use of node collisions among cooperating cores, exploiting the multi‐core's shared memory architecture. As a result, all cores effectively run at full speed until enough way‐points are found. We show that this approach is a fast, practical and scalable solution and that it flexibly handles dynamic obstacles in a natural way. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Flocking techniques to naturally support navigation in large and open virtual worlds

This paper proposes and explores the use of flocking techniques to naturally support navigation in large and open virtual environments. The proposed approach comprises both a flocking algorithm (which simulates the behavior of a flock of virtual beings) and a control algorithm (which manages the navigation information and parameterizes the flocking behavior). The model was developed and evaluated through a user study which investigated whether the addition of the proposed model has an effect on the user experience when exploring a virtual environment. In the research the experiment group explored a virtual environment where the proposed flocking model was added to suggest places to visit. The participants were not informed about the guiding abilities of the virtual animals. The control group explored the same virtual environment without the animal flock. The impact of both cases was compared. The results indicate that the proposed model is adequate to suggest places to visit in large and open virtual worlds.

Dealing with Multiple Truths in Online Virtual Worlds

Virtual environments and online games are becoming a major market force. At the same time, the virtual property contained in these environments is being traded for real money and thus attains a real value. Although the legal issues involved with this virtual property have not yet been decided, they will have to be soon. It is foreseeable that the next generation of very large virtual worlds will carry the possibility of multiple truths existing at the same time. Under such circumstances, it will be impossible to physically protect virtual property. In order to protect virtual property, virtual environment systems will therefore have to conform to certain requirements. We analyze what these requirements are in order to either prevent cheating or at least prove a digital offence has transpired. Along with greater security, this will also simplify end user support, which is one of the major cost factors for online games.

Scalable real‐time animation of rivers

AbstractMany recent games and applications target the interactive exploration of realistic large scale worlds. These worlds consist mostly of static terrain models, as the simulation of animated fluids in these virtual worlds is computationally expensive. Adding flowing fluids, such as rivers, to these virtual worlds would greatly enhance their realism, but causes specific issues: as the user is usually observing the world at close range, small scale details such as waves and ripples are important. However, the large scale of the world makes classical methods impractical for simulating these effects. In this paper, we present an algorithm for the interactive simulation of realistic flowing fluids in large virtual worlds. Our method relies on two key contributions: the local computation of the velocity field of a steady flow given boundary conditions, and the advection of small scale details on a fluid, following the velocity field, and uniformly sampled in screen space.