Guidance field: Potential field to guide users to target locations in virtual environments

It is known that interacting with virtual objects enhances users' understanding and interests more effectively than learning through passive media. However, compared with the passive media, the excessive amount of information and interactive options in most virtual reality settings may cause users to quit exploring before they experience the entire content of the virtual world. In this paper, we propose a new guidance method to implicitly lead users to pre-defined locations in the virtual environment while continuing to permit free explorations by using a kind of potential field (guidance field). The guidance field is composed of two independent mechanisms: locomotion guidance and rotation guidance. We implemented our method in a virtual museum exploring system and exhibited it in a real museum to evaluate the effectiveness of our method when used by a large number of people. The result suggests that our method successfully guides users to pre-defined locations and makes users aware of pre-defined objects. Moreover, the results suggest that our guidance may not interfere users' arbitrary explorations.