Navigating 3D Virtual Environments by Following Embodied Agents: a Proposal and its Informal Evaluation on a Virtual Museum Application

Many 3D virtual environments (e.g., 3D Web sites) do not offer sufficient assistance to (especially novice) users in navigating the virtual environment, find objects/places of interests, and learn how to interact with them. This paper proposes the adoption of guided tours of virtual environments as an effective user aid and describes a novel tool that provides automatic code generation for adding such guided tours to 3D virtual environments developed using the VRML language. In the second part of the paper, we informally evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world application concerning a 3D computer science museum (a complement to a real-world exhibition focusing on the history of computer technology).