Amphitheater Layout with Egocentric Distance-Based Item Sizing and Landmarks for Browsing in Virtual Reality

ABSTRACT

To allow more rapid and accurate accesses in the virtual reality browsing interfaces, an amphitheater layout with varying egocentric distance-based item sizing (EDIS) is presented, and items at different egocentric distances with sizes proportional to the distances are placed. The effects of EDIS variations on the retrieval and recall performance depend on the distance configurations. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 showed that small and medium EDIS variations gave efficient trial completions in near-field distance perception for small and medium item sets. For large-item sets, the further items in the amphitheater layout may lie beyond the near-field distance perception. We therefore adopt additional 3D visual landmarks in the amphitheater layout (Experiment 4); while both the location-fixed and user-defined 3D pins greatly improved completion and accuracy performance, they showed no significant difference between them, indicating that location-fixed landmarks would be suffice. These findings suggest the use of spatial and visual landmarks for effective VR browsing interfaces.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Bio-synergy research project (No. 2013M3A9C4078140) of the ministry of science, ICT, and future planning through the National Research Foundation. The authors thank every participant in these experiments, and the anonymous reviewers for the comments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea: [2013M3A9C4078140].

Notes on contributors

BoYu Gao

BoYu Gao is currently a postdoctoral researcher with Department of Software, Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea. His main research interests include designing perceptual-based user interfaces in VR and evoking believable responses in virtual environments.

Byungmoon Kim

Byungmoon Kim is a senior researcher in Creative Intelligence Lab, Adobe Research, San Jose, CA, USA, where he is working on computer graphics and simulation problems. His current and near future research interests are digital painting, real-time graphics, fluid simulation and control for interactive design systems, and user interfaces in virtual environments.

Jee-In Kim

Jee-In Kim is a professor with Department of Software, Konkuk University. He is currently the Director of Digital Contents Research Center at Konkuk University. His research interests include ubiquitous computing, visualization, and human–computer interaction.

HyungSeok Kim

HyungSeok Kim is a professor with Department of Software, Konkuk University. His research interests include real-time interaction in virtual environments and multimodal interaction mechanisms, shape modeling for real-time rendering, and evoking believable experiences in virtual environments.