VR safari park: a concept-based world building interface using blocks and world tree

Abstract

We present a concept-based world building approach, realized in a system called VR Safari Park, which allows users to rapidly create and manipulate a world simulation. Conventional world building tools focus on the manipulation and arrangement of entities to set up the simulation, which is time consuming as it requires frequent view and entity manipulations. Our approach focuses on a far simpler mechanic, where users add virtual blocks which represent world entities (e.g. animals, terrain, weather, etc.) to a World Tree, which represents the simulation. In so doing, the World Tree provides a quick overview of the simulation, and users can easily set up scenarios in the simulation without having to manually perform fine-grain manipulations on world entities. A preliminary user study found that the proposed interface is effective and usable for novice users without prior immersive VR experience.