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Active guideline: spatiotemporal history as a motion technique and navigation aid for virtual environments

Published: 05 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Users of virtual environments regularly have problems using 3D motion interfaces and exhibit a disturbing tendency to become disoriented and get lost quickly in large virtual worlds. We introduce the active guideline, a novel auxiliary motion technique and navigation aid for virtual environments. Similar to the ubiquitous Back-button interface for web navigation, the active guideline implicitly records a history of the user's motion and allows immediate and convenient travel back (and forth) along a trace of the previously traveled path. This lets users revisit previous viewpoints, allowing them to recover from being "lost in space" by enabling easy, continuous backtracking all the way up to the "home" position. In contrast to bookmarking of viewpoints, the active guideline is "always-on" and requires no active user intervention or strategic planning to successfully function as a navigation aid. This paper discusses the behavior and implementation of the active guideline and presents results of an initial study exploring the usability of the technique.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Beyond Being Real: A Sensorimotor Control Perspective on Interactions in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517706(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2010)Distance field illuminationProceedings of the 6th international conference on Advances in visual computing - Volume Part II10.5555/1940006.1940065(501-510)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2010
  • (2010)Distance Field Illumination: A Rendering Method to Aid in Navigation of Virtual EnvironmentsAdvances in Visual Computing10.1007/978-3-642-17274-8_49(501-510)Online publication date: 2010

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cover image ACM Conferences
VRST '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
November 2007
259 pages
ISBN:9781595938633
DOI:10.1145/1315184
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 November 2007

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Author Tags

  1. backtracking
  2. navigation
  3. virtual environments

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View all
  • (2022)Beyond Being Real: A Sensorimotor Control Perspective on Interactions in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517706(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2010)Distance field illuminationProceedings of the 6th international conference on Advances in visual computing - Volume Part II10.5555/1940006.1940065(501-510)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2010
  • (2010)Distance Field Illumination: A Rendering Method to Aid in Navigation of Virtual EnvironmentsAdvances in Visual Computing10.1007/978-3-642-17274-8_49(501-510)Online publication date: 2010

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