Designing, testing and adapting navigation techniques for the immersive web

One of the most essential interactions in Virtual Reality (VR) is the user’s ability to move around and explore the virtual environment. The design of the navigation technique plays a crucial role in the user experience since it determines key usability aspects. VR devices allow for an immersive exploration of 3D worlds, but navigation in VR is challenging for many users, due to potential usability issues related to specific VR controllers, user skills, and motion sickness. Although hundreds of interaction techniques have been proposed for this task, VR navigation still poses a high entry barrier for many users. In this paper we argue that adapting the navigation technique to its context of use can lead to substantial improvements in navigation usability and accessibility. The context of use includes the type of scene, the available physical space, as well as the profile of the user. We present a test platform to facilitate the design and fine-tuning of interaction techniques for 3D navigation. We focus on mainstream VR devices (headsets and controllers) and support the most common navigation metaphors (walking, flying, teleportation). The key idea is to let developers specify, at runtime, the exact mapping between user actions and locomotion changes, for any of the supported metaphors. Such mappings are described by a collection of parameters (e.g. maximum speed) whose values can be adjusted interactively through a GUI, or be provided by user-defined code which can be edited at runtime. Feedback obtained from developers suggests that this approach can be used to quickly adapt the navigation techniques to various people including persons with no previous 3D navigation skills, elderly people, and people with disabilities, as well as to the type, size and semantics of the virtual environment.
This work has been funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER ‘‘A way to make Europe’’. Pedret model partially funded by EU Horizon 2020, JPICH Conservation, Protection and Use initiative (JPICH-0127) and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación, grant PCI2020-111979 Enhancement of Heritage Experiences: the Middle Ages; Digital Layered Models of Architecture and Mural Paintings over Time (EHEM)
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (published version)