Interactive Navigation and Exploration of Virtual Environments on Handheld Devices

Abstract

Arbitrarily 3D scenes pose difficult challenges to real-time visualization, navigation and exploration on mobile devices. We have developed a framework for supporting interactive navigation and exploration of mobile virtual environments. Our framework can be used to load dynamically virtual environments from a remote PC server, navigate through them, find an optimal and collision-free path from one place to another, and obtain additional information on the objects of interest by directly pointing to their representation in the virtual world. As a proof of concept of the framework as well as to illustrate its use and main functionalities, we have run tests with a virtual world containing more than one hundred thousand triangles. A walkthrough of this world shows how the framework allocates resources memory and processing time to execute the tasks of rendering, geometric transformations, collision detection, and scenes loading, and how its performance is affected under different navigation scenarios.