Designing effective navigation for photo-realistic VR environments

In interactive pictures or virtual reality (VR) scenes where no explicit buttons exist, users may be overwhelmed by the number of possible and perfectly logical locations in which hot spots might be embedded. In any particular scene, the users are too often left to their own devices in order to find hot spots (portals, gates, links). This problem becomes even more acute in photo-realistic environments, since control over which object appears in the final image may be limited. In this paper, we propose a version of our toolbox aimed at helping designers identify and enhance hot spots' image regions so that they become more apparent and attractive or, in other words, grab the user's attention. This computer tool performs an evaluation of images based on their physical features (hue, saturation, lightness, size, contrast and, more recently, texture, shape and edge orientation) and graphically shows which regions are more likely to attract a user's gaze.