WorldManager: Multiple Views for Immersive Environments

This package is an attempt to elegantly represent multiple views of a scene within the context of of an immersive environment. The following picture represents a conceptual try at a solution.

In the picture, the spheres in the foreground represent other views of the scene. When the user selects a sphere, his viewpoint zooms into the viewpoint within the sphere, and his prior viewpoint appears in a bounding sphere. The spheres can be resized by the user; as the sphere's size increases so does the level of detail of the scene within the sphere. Changes to the scene are reflected in all of the spheres, but the head tracking and events are only passed to the main scene being viewed. Lastly, the spheres' positions are relative to the camera, so that when the user walks around in the scene, the spheres stay directly within his grasp/view.

References

The most interesting papers are at the University of Virgina. They have coined the term WIM (World-In-Miniature), and they describe many general applications, including a means for multiple viewpoints. I think it will be great if we can implement such a multi-user, multi-view system as our UI component progresses.

• Virtual Reality on a WIM: Interactive Worlds in Miniature


• Navigation and Locomotion in Virtual Worlds via Flight into Hand-Held Miniatures