We present a task-based taxonomy of navigation techniques for 3D virtual environments, used to categorize existing techniques, drive exploration of the design space, and inspire new techniques. We briefly discuss several new techniques, and describe in detail one new technique, Speed-coupled Flying with Orbiting. This technique couples control of movement speed to camera height and tilt, allowing users to seamlessly transition between local environment-views and global overviews. Users can also orbit specific objects for inspection. Results from two competitive user studies suggest users performed better with Speed-coupled Flying with Orbiting over alternatives, with performance also enhanced by a large display.

The literature on information visualization establishes the usability of interfaces with an overview of the information space, but for zoomable user interfaces, results are mixed. We compare zoomable user interfaces with and without an overview to understand the navigation patterns and usability of these interfaces. Thirty-two subjects solved navigation and browsing tasks on two maps. We found no difference between interfaces in subjects ’ ability to solve tasks correctly. Eighty percent of the subjects preferred the interface with an overview, stating that it supported navigation and helped keep track of their position on the map. However, subjects were faster with the interface without an overview when using one of the two maps. We conjecture that this difference was due to the organization of that map in multiple levels, which rendered the overview unnecessary by providing richer navigation cues through semantic zooming. The combination of that map and the interface without an overview also improved subjects ’ recall of objects on the map. Subjects who switched between the overview and the detail windows used more time, suggesting that integration of overview and detail windows adds complexity and requires additional mental and motor effort.

Published reports suggest that males significantly outperform females in navigating virtual environments. A novel navigation technique reported in CHI 2001, when combined with a large display and wide field of view, appeared to reduce that gender bias. That work has been extended with two navigation studies in order to understand the finding under carefully controlled conditions. The first study replicated the finding that a wide field of view coupled with a large display benefits both male and female users and reduces gender bias. The second study suggested that wide fields of view on a large display were useful to females despite a more densely populated virtual world. Implications for design of virtual worlds and large displays are discussed. Specifically, women take a wider field of view to achieve similar virtual environment navigation performance to men.

Abstract not found

Many Web3D sites do not offer sufficient assistance to (especially novice) users in navigating the virtual world, find objects/places of interests, and learn how to interact with them. This paper aims at helping the Web3D content creator to face this problem by: (i) proposing the adoption of guided tours of virtual worlds as an effective user aid and (ii) describing a novel tool that provides automatic code generation for adding such guided tours to VRML worlds. Finally, we will show how the tool has been used in the development of an application concerning a 3D computer science museum.

This paper describes StyleCam, an approach for authoring 3D viewing experiences that incorporate stylistic elements that are not available in typical 3D viewers. A key aspect of StyleCam is that it allows the author to significantly tailor what the user sees and when they see it. The resulting viewing experience can approach the visual richness and pacing of highly authored visual content such as television commercials or feature films. At the same time, StyleCam allows for a satisfying level of interactivity while avoiding the problems inherent in using unconstrained camera models. The main components of StyleCam are camera surfaces which spatially constrain the viewing camera; animation clips that allow for visually appealing transitions between different camera surfaces; and a simple, unified, interaction technique that permits the user to seamlessly and continuously move between spatial-control of the camera and temporal-control of the animated transitions. Further, the user’s focus of attention is always kept on the content, and not on extraneous interface widgets. In addition to describing the conceptual model of StyleCam, its current implementation, and an example authored experience, we also present the results of an evaluation involving real users.

This paper presents the conceptual design of TagSEA, a collaborative tool to support asynchronous software development. Our goal is to develop a lightweight source code annotation tool that enhances navigation, coordination, and capture of knowledge relevant to a software development team. Our design is inspired by combining “waypoints ” from geographical navigation with “social tagging ” from social bookmarking software to support coordination and communication among software developers. We describe the motivation behind this work, walk through the design and implementation, and report early feedback on how this lightweight tool supports collaborative software engineering activities. Finally, we suggest a number of new research directions that this topic exposes.

Although some guidelines (e.g., based on architectural principles) have been proposed for designing Virtual Environments (VEs), several usability problems can be identified only by studying the behavior of real users in VEs. This paper proposes a tool, called VU-Flow, that is able to automatically record usage data of VEs and then visualize it in formats that make it easy for the VE designer to visually detect peculiar users ' behaviors and thus better understand the effects of her design choices. In particular, the visualizations concern: i) the detailed paths followed by single users or groups of users in the VE, ii) areas of maximum (or minimum) users ' flow, iii) the parts of the environment more seen (or less seen) by users, iv) detailed replay of users visits. We show examples of how these

Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet recent studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called Code Thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a spatial memory of it. To aid intra-file navigation, we add a thumbnail image of the file to the scrollbar, which makes any part of the file one click away. To aid interfile navigation, we provide a desktop of file thumbnail images, which make any part of any file one click away. We did a formative evaluation of the design with eleven experienced developers and present the results. 1.

The navigation support provided by user interfaces of Virtual Environments (VEs) is often inadequate and tends to be overly complex, especially in the case of large-scale VEs. In this paper, we propose a novel navigation aid that aims at allowing users to easily locate objects and places inside large-scale VEs. The aid exploits 3D arrows to point towards the objects and places the user is interested in. We illustrate and discuss the experimental evaluation we carried out to assess the usefulness of the proposed solution, contrasting it with more traditional 2D navigation aids. In particular, we compared subjects ’ performance in 4 conditions which differ for the type of provided navigation aid: three conditions employed respectively the proposed “3D arrows ” aid, an aid based on 2D arrows, and a 2D aid based on a radar metaphor; the fourth condition was a control condition with no navigation aids available. Author Keywords Virtual environments, navigation aids, evaluation.