3D Location-pointing as a Navigation Aid in Virtual Environments

The navigation support provided by user interfaces of Virtual Environments (VEs) is often inadequate and tends to be overly complex, especially in the case of large-scale VEs. In this paper, we propose a novel navigation aid that aims at allowing users to easily locate objects and places inside large-scale VEs. The aid exploits 3D arrows to point towards the objects and places the user is interested in. We illustrate and discuss the experimental evaluation we carried out to assess the usefulness of the proposed solution, contrasting it with more traditional 2D navigation aids. In particular, we compared subjects’ performance in 4 conditions which differ for the type of provided navigation aid: three conditions employed respectively the proposed “3D arrows” aid, an aid based on 2D arrows, and a 2D aid based on a radar metaphor; the fourth condition was a control condition with no navigation aids available.