LazyNav: 3D Ground Navigation with Non-Critical Body Parts

Figure 1: We performed a user study to evaluate several ground navigation metaphors. Top-left: Top view of the virtual city, users have to follow the green path as closely as possible. Top-right: At the beginning of the session, the available motions are displayed to the user, while her rest pose is captured. Bottom: a user is travelling in the scene while holding a cup in his hand. With the growing interest in natural input devices and virtual reality, mid-air ground navigation is becoming a fundamental interaction for a large collection of application scenarios. While classical input devices (e.g., mouse/keyboard, gamepad, touchscreen) have their own ground navigation standards, natural input techniques still lack acknowledged mechanisms for travelling in a 3D scene. In particu-lar, for most applications, navigation is not the primary interaction. Thus, the user should navigate in the scene while still being able to perform other interactions with her hands, and observe the dis-played content by moving her eyes and locally rotating her head. Since most ground navigation scenarios require only two degrees of freedom to move forward or backward and rotate the view to the left or to the right, we propose LazyNav a mid-air ground naviga-tion control model which lets the users hands, eyes or local head orientation completely free, making use of a single pair of the re-maining tracked body elements to tailor the navigation. To this end, we design several navigation body motions and study their desired properties, such as being easy to discover, easy to control, socially acceptable, accurate and not tiring. We also develop several as-sumptions about motions design for ground navigation and evalu-ate them. Finally, we highlight general advices on mid-air ground navigation techniques