Abstract
Virtual environment landmarks are essential in wayfinding: they anchor
routes through a region and provide memorable destinations to return to
later. Current virtual environment browsers provide user interface menus
that characterize available travel destinations via landmark textual descriptions
or thumbnail images. Such characterizations lack the depth cues and context
needed to reliably recognize 3D landmarks. This paper introduces a new
user interface affordance that captures a 3D representation of a virtual
environment landmark into a 3D thumbnail, called a worldlet. Each worldlet
is a miniature virtual world fragment that may be interactively viewed
in 3D, enabling a traveler to gain first-person experience with a travel
destination. In a pilot study conducted to compare textual, image, and
worldlet landmark representations within a wayfinding task, worldlet use
significantly reduced the overall travel time and distance traversed,
virtually eliminating unnecessary backtracking.
Keywords
3D thumbnails, wayfinding, VRML, virtual reality
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