VR Safari Park: a Concept-Based World Building Interface using Blocks and World Tree

Shotaro Ichikawa, Kazuki Takashima, Anthony Tang, and Yoshifumi Kitamura. (2018). VR Safari Park: a Concept-Based World Building Interface using Blocks and World Tree. In VRST 2018: Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, 6:1–6:5. Acceptance: 32/145 - 22%.

Abstract

We present a concept-based world building approach, realized in a system called VR Safari Park, which allows users to rapidly create and manipulate a world simulation. Conventional world building tools focus on the manipulation and arrangement of entities to set up the simulation, which is time consuming as it requires frequent view and entity manipulations. Our approach focuses on a far simpler mechanic, where users add virtual blocks which represent world entities (e.g. animals, terrain, weather, etc.) to a World Tree, which represents the simulation. In so doing, the World Tree provides a quick overview of the simulation, and users can easily set up scenarios in the simulation without having to manually perform fine-grain manipulations on world entities. A preliminary user study found that the proposed interface is effective and usable for novice users without prior immersive VR experience.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2018-vrst2018-vr-safari-park.pdf)
Video (http://hcitang.org/papers/2018-vrst2018-vr-safari-park.mp4)
DOI (https://doi.org/10.1145/3281505.3281517)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ichikawa2018safaripark,
  author = {Ichikawa, Shotaro and Takashima, Kazuki and Tang, Anthony and Kitamura, Yoshifumi},
  title = {{VR} Safari Park: a Concept-Based World Building Interface using Blocks
                 and World Tree},
  booktitle = {VRST 2018: Proceedings of the 24th {ACM} Symposium on Virtual Reality Software
                 and Technology},
  pages = {6:1--6:5},
  year = {2018},
  type = {conference},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3281505.3281517},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2018-vrst2018-vr-safari-park.pdf},
  videourl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2018-vrst2018-vr-safari-park.mp4},
  acceptance = {32/145 - 22%}
}