Week 12 summary
Exploring 3D Navigation: Combining Speed-coupled Flying with Orbiting
-Desney S. Tan1, George G. Robertson, Mary Czerwinski
This paper is a study of existing navigational technologies for 3d virtual environments. The authors have studied and developed taxonomy of navigational approaches to enable future systematic studies. They categorize 3d VE interactions into task selection, travel control and user interface. Task selection deals with the various ways of selecting the task to perform on the environment or objects in the environment. Travel control deals with pathing, speed of movement and different user orientations in the VE. The work proposed by the author’s in this paper targets this category. Lastly, the user interface is further classified into input mechanism, type of display, type of views, control frequency and control mapping. The authors also created a VE that allows selecting the task by context. For example, if the user drags on an object the system allows the user to manipulate that object; else if the user drags in free space like the sky the system allows for free user movement in the VE. Further the authors describe a navigation technique called speed-coupled flying with orbit. The technique basically changes the elevation of the view camera with increase in movement speed. The authors claim that this allows for a better view of the environment and more control over the available information. This claim is tested later on in the paper.
I feel like the taxonomy generation is definitely useful for understanding past work and categorizing future research. The navigational technique described reminds me of games like Need for Speed where the camera angle changes if you use nitrous. This technique would be a nice touch to virtual environment navigation.
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