Object-centered navigation in virtual construction applications

In this paper we present a novel concept for navigation in virtual environments. While a variety of navigation metaphors have been proposed for immersive VR, desktop scenarios are typically based on mouse navigation, using a flying, walking or driving metaphor. Steering all six degrees of freedom in this way is a complicated task even for a trained user. We propose an innovative object-centered concept for navigation, which allows exploring an unknown environment by directly going to the objects one desires looking at closely. The user specifies the object by its name, e.g. "table", an aspect, e.g. "front" and a distance level, e.g. "near" in an intuitive fashion and is immediately transferred to the desired look-at point. This is done by pointing to an object with the mouse or using a simple speech recognition approach. The object-centered viewpoints are computed dynamically and need not be predefined. Our new navigation concept has been approved by different users and has been tested in an interactive construction environment.