UrbanRama: Navigating Cities in Virtual Reality
This addresses a navigation issue for users in domains like gaming and urban planning, but it is incremental as it builds on existing VR interfaces with a specific warping technique.
The paper tackles the problem of users needing to switch between local and global views when navigating virtual cities in VR, which causes loss of context and distraction. It introduces UrbanRama, a system using a cylindrical projection to blend views, and a pilot study shows it reduces perspective changes without affecting distance and orientation perception.
Exploring large virtual environments, such as cities, is a central task in several domains, such as gaming and urban planning. VR systems can greatly help this task by providing an immersive experience; however, a common issue with viewing and navigating a city in the traditional sense is that users can either obtain a local or a global view, but not both at the same time, requiring them to continuously switch between perspectives, losing context and distracting them from their analysis. In this paper, our goal is to allow users to navigate to points of interest without changing perspectives. To accomplish this, we design an intuitive navigation interface that takes advantage of the strong sense of spatial presence provided by VR. We supplement this interface with a perspective that warps the environment, called UrbanRama, based on a cylindrical projection, providing a mix of local and global views. The design of this interface was performed as an iterative process in collaboration with architects and urban planners. We conducted a qualitative and a quantitative pilot user study to evaluate UrbanRama and the results indicate the effectiveness of our system in reducing perspective changes, while ensuring that the warping doesn't affect distance and orientation perception.