Real-time camera planning for navigation in virtual environments

Abstract

In this work, we have developed a real-time camera control module for navigation in virtual environments. With this module, the tracking motion of a third-person camera can be generated automatically to allow a user to focus on the control of an avatar. The core of this module consists of a motion planner that uses the probabilistic roadmap method and a lazy update strategy to generate the motion of the camera, possibly with necessary intercuts. A dynamic roadmap specified relative to the avatar is updated in real time within a time budget to account for occlusions in every frame of the control loop. In addition, the planner also allows a user to specify preferences on how the tracking motion is generated. We will use several examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of this real-time camera planning system. ©Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.