Worldlets - 3D thumbnails for wayfinding in virtual environments

Abstract

Virtual environment landmarks are essential in wayfinding: they anchor routes through a region and provide memorable destinations to return to later. Current virtual environment browsers provide user interface menus that characterize available travel destinations via landmark textual descriptions or thumbnail images. Such characterizations lack the depth cues and context needed to reliably recognize 3D landmarks. This paper introduces a new user interface affordance that captures a 3D representation of a virtual environment landmark into a 3D thumbnail, called a worldlet. Each worldlet is a miniature virtual world fragment that may be interactively viewed in 3D, enabling a traveler to gain first-person experience with a travel destination. In a pilot study conducted to compare textual, image, and worldlet landmark representations within a wayfinding task, worldlet use significantly reduced the overall travel time and distance traversed, virtually eliminating unnecessary backtracking.