Navigation with place representations and visible landmarks

Existing navigation techniques do not scale well to large virtual worlds. We present a new technique, navigation with place representations and visible landmarks that scales from town-sized to planet-sized worlds. Visible landmarks make distant landmarks visible and allow users to travel relative to those landmarks with a single gesture. Actual and symbolic place representations allow users to detect and travel to more distant locations with a small number of gestures. The world's semantic place hierarchy determines which visible landmarks and place representations users can see at any point in time. We present experimental results demonstrating that our technique allows users to navigate more efficiently than a modified panning and zooming W1M, completing within-place navigation tasks 22% faster and between-place tasks 38% faster on average.