Constrained Navigation Environments

Finding one's way through a complex virtual environment is a standard task in 3D graphics and virtual reality applications. Constrained navigation is a method that appropriately restricts the user's degrees of freedom when there is a poor match between the goal of an exploration activity, the control device, and the user's familiarity with the exploration domain. The fundamental prerequisite for the adoption of constrained navigation is that the designer can significantly improve the quality of the user's experience by choosing a predetermined parametric set of viewing parameters or algorithms. We discuss families of constrained navigation methods appropriate to desktop and immersive virtual reality applications. We illustrate the approach with a variety of examples, emphasizing the possibility of topologically nontrivial navigation spaces, and present the results of a preliminary user study.