Testbed evaluation of navigation and text display techniques in an information-rich virtual environment

The fundamental question for an information-rich virtual environment is how to access and display abstract information. We investigated two existing navigation techniques: hand-centered object manipulation extending ray-casting (HOMER) and go-go navigation, and two text layout techniques: within-the-world display (WWD) and heads-up display (HUD). Four search tasks were performed to measure participants' performance in a densely packed environment. HUD enabled significantly better performance than WWD and the go-go technique enabled better performance than the HOMER technique for most of the tasks. We found that using HOMER navigation combined with the WWD technique was significantly worse than other combinations for difficult naive search tasks. Users also preferred the combination of go-go and HUD for all tasks.