Design guidelines for landmarks to support navigation in virtual environments
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Lessons from research on interaction with virtual environments
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
Flocking techniques to naturally support navigation in large and open virtual worlds
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
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Procedurally generated 3D worlds pose their own problems in terms of user's navigation. The rules for supporting wayfinding through specific world generation have to be categorized and implemented in the generative algorithms. Our answer to this problem is based on a combination of the architectural theories by Lynch and Alexander. We adjusted a procedural world generator to include selected patterns as suggested by these theorists. Unlike other research, we put our main focus not on an arrangement of obvious landmarks but instead on the organization of objects that form patterns of much smaller scale in their spatial combination to trace how players structure and comprehend these environmental patterns. Our hypothesis was that these smallscale patterns would assist player navigation in procedural worlds. We tested our model in the procedural world generator Charbitat. Statistical analyses showed no significant effect of environmental patterns on player navigation. However, post-experiment questionnaires indicated that users were aware of the patterns and had used them for orientation. This suggests that while patterns were sought after, they alone apparently were not sufficient to improve user navigation in the 3D world.