Viewpoint-controlled Navigation in Virtual Reality for Exploratory Image Browsing
Summary
Virtual reality allows users to explore virtual worlds in a close-tonatural
way. As the current trend of gaming and tele-presence applications
suggests, this has much potential for realistic experiences.
But there is more. Not only is the experience realistic, it is also intuitive
and thus we aspire to explore the potential of virtual reality for
abstract environments. In this thesis we set out to explore the suitability
of virtual reality for exploratory image browsing. In particular
viewpoint control and the effect of visualizations are examined.
Our participants expressed more enthusiasm for exploratory image
browsing in a confined domain of their expertise than for broad applications
to discover new images. During the navigation, some of
the participants looked at center of the view, others towards the edges.
Some used the structure to navigate, others the passing images. The
fisheye views were appreciated if the view highlighted regions of
interest. Distortion of the sphere fisheye view approach was acceptable
for layouts with other information such as structure and similarity,
whereas the stacking fisheye view approach suffered from incorrectly
rectifying depth levels in the stack. Using the viewpoint to
navigate was very easy and intuitive to learn and quite satisfactory,
although the resolution of head-mounted displays cannot compete
with that of high resolution screens yet.