“Guidance Field: Vector Field for Implicit Guidance in Virtual Environments” by Tanaka, Narumi, Tanikawa and Hirose

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Entry Number: 09

Title:


    Guidance Field: Vector Field for Implicit Guidance in Virtual Environments

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Description:


    A ‘guidance field’ is a kind of a vector field that implicitly guides users to a target point. Users’ input for travelling in virtual environments is slightly altered to get closer to the target directions according to the guidance field.

    Compared with passive instructional videos, free explorations in virtual environments are efficient to understand the spatial knowledge and the context of the virtual environments. However, in most virtual reality settings, there is so much information and interactive options that users may quit exploring before they experience the whole content of the world. In that case, users cannot recognize the inherent attraction and context of the virtual environments. Therefore, it is necessary to guide users so that they become aware of the important points in the virtual environments. Galyean guided users by steering them along a pre-defined path while at the same time allowing some extent of free exploring [Galyean, 1995]. However, in their method, the constraint of the user’s exploration is so strong that the benefits of the interactive exploration shrink. Thus, there is a trade-off between guiding users and allowing free explorations.

    In this research, we propose a new guidance method to implicitly lead users to pre-defined points in the virtual environment while allowing free explorations. This is achieved by altering users’ input operations according to a type of vector field, which we refer to as a guidance field (Figure 1 top).

References:


    GALYEAN, T. A. 1995. Guided navigation of virtual environments. In Proceedings of the 1995 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, ACM, 103–ff.

    Chen, S. E. et al. 1995. Quicktime VR: An image-based approach to virtual environment navigation. In Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, ACM, 29–38.

    TANAKA, R. et al. 2016. Guidance Field: Potential Field to Guide Users to Target Locations in Virtual Environments. In 3D User Interfaces (3DUI), 2016 IEEE Symposium on. (accepted)

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