Sketch-based Route Planning with Mobile Devices in immersive Virtual Environments

We present a novel sketch-based route planning technique, that supports the collaborative work of a group of people navigating through a virtual environments using mobile devices. With our new approach, route planning tasks, like creating camera animation paths, can be generated very efficient, while working on large screens with complex data. Our interaction technique lets the user explore the distributed environment in a two stage process. During the first stage, the user draws the preferred navigation path directly onto a touch sensitive mobile device, that presents the data as a “World in Miniature”. Afterward, during a second stage, the user can define areas of interest by performing additional sketches, like drawing points, lines or circles, to easily define the camera orientation during the animation. Based on the sketched input, the system creates automatically the optimal animation path and camera orientation, so that disturbing occlusions are avoided and all areas of interest are in view. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Artificial, augmented and virtual realities;