An Overview of Group Navigation in Multi-User Virtual Reality

We classify group navigation techniques in virtual reality by the number of involved distributed workspaces (left) and the number of collocated users situated within each of theses spaces (right).

Abstract

Group navigation techniques can allow both collocated and distributed collaborators to explore a shared virtual environment together. In this paper, we review the different facets, the resulting challenges, and previous implementations of group navigation in the literature and derive four broad and non-exclusive topic areas for future research on the subject. Our overarching goal is to underline the importance of optimizing navigation processes for groups and to increase the awareness of group navigation techniques as a relevant solution approach in this regard.

Our research received funding from the Thuringian Ministry for Economic Affairs, Science, and Digital Society under grant 5575/10-5 (MetaReal). We would like to thank the members of the Virtual Reality and Visualization Research Group at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Publication

Tim Weissker, Pauline Bimberg, and Bernd Froehlich. 2021.
An Overview of Group Navigation in Multi-User Virtual Reality
In 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), pp. 363-369, Virtual Event. 2021. IEEE Computer Society. DOI: 10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00073
[preprint]