CamBridge: a bridge of camera aesthetic between virtual environment designers and players

Abstract

The designer of the virtual environment have been trying for decades to provide the player with more enjoyable, comfortable and also informative user experiences, and yet still fail to ensure that the player follow the preset instructions and even implicit suggestions faithfully and naturally, due to the designer's invisibility during runtime, and the player's individual diversity and individual impromptu in manipulations. We believe that the camera is the mainly messenger for the designer and the player to communicate, and intend to build a bridge between them. By binding the designer's aesthetic ideas to the parameters of the camera's movement, we enable the player to roam in the virtual scene with the guidance from the designer. We also propose a navigation guiding language (NGL) to assist the binding and the guiding process. A user study is made to evaluate the performance of our method. Experiments and questionnaires have shown that our method can offer a more attentive and pleasing experience to the player with implicit guidance.