Testbed Evaluation of Navigation and Text Display Techniques in an Information-Rich Virtual Environment

  • Authors:
  • Jian Chen;Pardha S. Pyla;Doug A. Bowman

  • Affiliations:
  • Virginia Tech, Blacksburg;Virginia Tech, Blacksburg;Virginia Tech, Blacksburg

  • Venue:
  • VR '04 Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2004
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The fundamental question for an information-richvirtual environment is how to access and displayabstract information. We investigated two existingnavigation techniques: Hand-Centered ObjectManipulation Extending Ray-casting (HOMER) andGo-Go navigation, and two text layout techniques:within-the-world display (WWD) and heads-up display(HUD). Four search tasks were performed to measureparticipants' performance in a densely packedenvironment. HUD enabled significantly betterperformance than WWD and the Go-Go techniqueenabled better performance than the HOMERtechnique for most of the tasks. We found that usingHOMER navigation combined with the WWD techniquewas significantly worse than other combinations fordifficult naïve search tasks. Users also preferred thecombination of Go-Go and HUD for all tasks.