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Stanford HPS 154 - Wayfinding in Virtual Environments

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Worldlets - 3D Thumbnails forWayfinding in Virtual EnvironmentsT. Todd Elvins David R. [email protected] [email protected] Diego Supercomputer CenterP.O. Box 85608San Diego, CA 92186-9784, USADavid [email protected] of California, San Diego9500 Gilman DriveLa Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USAABSTRACTVirtual environment landmarks are essential in wayfinding:they anchor routes through a region and provide memorabledestinations to return to later. Current virtual environmentbrowsers provide user interface menus that characterizeavailable travel destinations via landmark textualdescriptions or thumbnail images. Such characterizationslack the depth cues and context needed to reliably recognize3D landmarks. This paper introduces a new user interfaceaffordance that captures a 3D representation of a virtualenvironment landmark into a 3D thumbnail, called aworldlet. Each worldlet is a miniature virtual worldfragment that may be interactively viewed in 3D, enabling atraveler to gain first-person experience with a traveldestination. In a pilot study conducted to compare textual,image, and worldlet landmark representations within awayfinding task, worldlet use significantly reduced theoverall travel time and distance traversed, virtuallyeliminating unnecessary backtracking.KEYWORDS: 3D thumbnails, wayfinding, VRML, virtualreality.INTRODUCTIONWayfinding is “the ability to find a way to a particularlocation in an expedient manner and to recognize thedestination when reached” [13]. Travelers find their wayusing survey, procedural, and landmark knowledge [5, 13,14, 9]. Each type of knowledge helps the traveler constructa cognitive map of a region and thereafter navigate usingthat map [10, 11].Survey knowledge provides a map-like, bird’s eye view of aregion and contains spatial information including locations,orientations, and sizes of regional features. Proceduralknowledge characterizes a region by memorized sequencesof actions that construct routes to desired destinations.Landmark knowledge records the visual features oflandmarks, including their 3D shape, size, texture, etc. [2,9]. For a structure to be a landmark, it must have highimagability: it must be distinctive and memorable [10].Landmarks are the subject of landmark knowledge, but alsoplay a part in survey and procedural knowledge. In surveyknowledge, landmarks provide regional anchors with whichto calibrate distances and directions. In proceduralknowledge, landmarks mark decision points along a route,helping in the recall of procedures to get to and fromdestinations of interest. Overall, landmarks help tostructure an environment and provide directional cues tofacilitate wayfinding.Landmarks also influence the search strategies used bytravelers. With no a priori knowledge of a destination’slocation, a traveler is forced to use a naive, exhaustivesearch of the region. Landmarks provide directional cueswith which to steer such a naive search. In a primed search,the traveler knows the destination’s location and can movethere directly, navigating by survey, procedural, andlandmark knowledge. In practice, travelers use acombination of naive and primed searches. The location ofa curio shop, for instance, may be recalled as “near thecathedral,” enabling the traveler to use a primed search tothe cathedral landmark, then a bounded naive search in thecathedral’s vicinity to find the curio shop.In city planning, the legibility of an environmentcharacterizes “the ease with which its parts can berecognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern”[10]. Legibility expresses the ease with which a travelermay gain wayfinding knowledge and later apply thatknowledge to search for and reach a destination. Forinstance, a city with distinctive landmarks, a clear citystructure (such as a street grid) and well-markedthoroughfares is legible.In virtual environment design, the use of landmarks andstructure is essential in establishing an environment’slegibility. In a virtual environment lacking a structuralframework and directional cues, such as landmarks,travelers easily become disoriented and are unable to searchfor destinations or construct an accurate cognitive map ofthe region [5]. Such a virtual environment is illegible.Real and virtual world travel guidebooks describe availablelandmarks and tourist attractions, highlighting regionalfeatures that enhance the environment’s legibility.Guidebook descriptions facilitate wayfinding by priming atraveler’s cognitive map with landmark knowledge,preparing them for exploration of the actual environment.Similar to travel guidebooks, virtual environment browsersfacilitate wayfinding by providing menus of availabledestinations. Selection of a menu item “jumps” the travelerto the destination, providing them a short-cut to a point ofinterest. Systematic exploration of all destinations listed ona menu enables a traveler to learn an environment andprime their cognitive map with landmark knowledge.Whereas a traveler’s landmark knowledge characterizes adestination by its 3D shape, size, texture, and so forth,browser menus and guidebooks characterize destinations bytextual descriptions or images. This representationmismatch reduces the effectiveness of destination menusand guidebooks. Unable to engage their memory of 3Dlandmarks to recognize destinations of interest, travelersmay resort to a naive, exhaustive search to find a desiredlandmark.This paper introduces a user interface affordance to increasethe effectiveness of landmark menus and guidebooks. Thisaffordance, called a worldlet, reduces the mismatchbetween a traveler’s landmark knowledge and the landmarkrepresentation used in menus and guidebooks.LANDMARK REPRESENTATION LEGIBILITYAnalogous to virtual environment legibility, the legibility ofa landmark representation technique expresses the ease withwhich it may be used to facilitate wayfinding. As a basis forcomparing landmark representations, we propose thefollowing legibility criteria:• imagability: A landmark representation has goodimagability if it provides


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