Tour Generation for Exploration of 3D Virtual Environments

Navigation in complex and large-scale 3D virtual environments hasbeen shown to be a difficult task, imposing a high cognitive loadon the user. In this paper, we present a comprehensive method forassisting users in exploring and understanding such 3D worlds. Themethod consists of two distinct phases: an off-line computation stepderiving a grand tour using the world geometry and any semantictarget information as input, and an on-line interactive navigationstep providing guided exploration and improved spatial perceptionfor the user. The former phase is based on a voxelized version ofthe geometrical dataset that is used to compute a connectivity graphfor use in a TSP-like formulation of the problem. The latter phasetakes the output tour from the off-line step as input for guiding 3Dnavigation through the environment