Automatic generation of world in miniatures for realistic architectural immersive virtual environments
Andrea Bönsch, Sebastian Freitag, Torsten Kuhlen · 2016
Orientation and wayfinding in architectural Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are non-trivial, accompanying tasks which generally support the users' main task. World in Miniatures (WIMs) - essentially 3D maps containing a scene replica - are an established approach to gain survey knowledge about the virtual world, as well as information about the user's relation to it. However, for large-scale, information-rich scenes, scaling and occlusion issues result in diminishing returns. Since there typically is a lack of standardized information regarding scene decompositions, presenting the inside of self-contained scene extracts is challenging. Therefore, we present an automatic WIM generation workflow for arbitrary, realistic in- and outdoor IVEs in order to support users with meaningfully selected and scaled extracts of the IVE as well as corresponding context information. Additionally, a 3D user interface is provided to manually manipulate the represented extract.