Demonstration of Guiding Techniques for Collaborative Exploration in Multi-Scale Shared Virtual Environments

Exploration of large-scale 3D Virtual Environments (VEs) is often difficult because of lack of familiarity with complex virtual worlds, lack of spatial information that can be offered to users and lack of sensory (visual, auditory, locomotive) details compared to the exploration of real environments. To address this problem we propose three guiding techniques in the form of navigation aids to enable one or several users (called helping user(s)) to help one main user (called exploring user) to explore the VE efficiently. These three techniques consist in drawing directional arrows, lighting up a path to follow, and orienting a compass to show a direction to the exploring user. All the three techniques are generic so they can be used for any kind of 3D VE, and they do not affect the main structure of the VE so its integrity is guaranteed.