A toolset for navigation in virtual environments

Abstract

Maintaining knowledge of current position and orientationis frequently a problem for people in virtual environments. In this paper we present a toolset of techniques based on principles of navigation derived from real world analogs, We include a discussion of human and avian navigation behaviors and show how knowledge about them were used to design our tools. We also summarize an informal study we performed to determine how our tools influenced the subjects' navigation behavior. We conclude that principles extracted from real world navigation AIDS such as maps can be seen to apply in virtual environments.