Navigation in Virtual Environment

VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENTS FOR GEOGRAPHIC VISUALISATION

Introduction

Today a wide variety of virtual worlds , cities and gaming environments exist and become part of life of their human inhabitants (Btzrner et al 2005 . Navigation is playing an increasingly important role in virtual environments (VE . Today virtual worlds are very large and present challenging navigation tasks . According to MacEachren et al (1999 virtual environment (VE ) technologies have considerable potential to extend the power of information visualization methods , and those of scientific visualization more broadly . Ruddle (1996 ) assertion of one in three people

get lost in virtual environment ' is true due to lack of knowledge but is possible to roam and explore these geographic environments . Previous work have been done to develop tools that generate visualisations of user and environment interaction for social navigation , monitor , study , and research virtual worlds and their evolving landscapes

Visualization and navigation in virtual environments

The geovisualization of virtual environments use of 3D display and thus has the potential to depict the three geographic dimensions of real spaces with each dimension of the display space depicting a geographic dimension (MacEachren et al , 1999 . There is progress and developments in research and applications in this field . A lot has been developed for example , Lahav and Mioduser (2003 ) developed and researched a multisensory virtual environment simulating spaces in real-life . Chen and Stanney (1999 ) came up with theoretical models of wayfinding , used to guide the design of navigational aiding in virtual environments Galyean (2006 ) immersed VR experience with the advantages of...