An Integrated Design of World-in-Miniature Navigation in Virtual Reality

Navigation is considered one of the most fundamental challenges in Virtual Reality (VR) and has been extensively researched [11]. The world-in-miniature (WIM) navigation metaphor allows users to travel in large-scale virtual environments (VEs) regardless of available physical space while maintaining a high-level overview of the VE. It relies on a hand-held, scaled-down duplicate of the entire VE, where the user’s current position is displayed, and an interface provided to introduce his/her next movements [17]. There are several extensions to deal with challenges of this navigation technique, e.g. scaling and scrolling [23]. In this work, a WIM is presented that integrates state-of-the-art research insights and incorporates additional features that became apparent during the integration process. These features are needed to improve user interactions and to provide both look-ahead and post-travel feedback. For instance, a novel occlusion handling feature hides the WIM geometry in a rounded space reaching from the user’s hand to his/her forearm. This allows the user to interact with occluded areas of the WIM such as buildings. Further extensions include different visualizations for occlusion handling, an interactive preview screen, post-travel feedback, automatic WIM customization, a unified diegetic UI design concerning WIM and user representation, and an adaptation of widely established gestures to control scaling and scrolling of the WIM. Overall, the presented WIM design integrates and extends state-of-the-art interaction tasks and visualization concepts to overcome open conceptual gaps and to provide a comprehensive practical solution for traveling in VR.