Hybrid Traveling in Fully-Immersive Large-Scale Geographic Environments

In this paper we present hybrid traveling concepts that enable users to navigate immersively through 3D geospatial environments displayed by arbitrary applications such as Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. We propose a framework which allows to integrate virtual reality (VR) based interaction devices and concepts into such applications that do not support VR technologies natively. In our proposed setup the content displayed by a geospatial application is visualized stereoscopically on a head-mounted display (HMD) for immersive exploration. The user's body is tracked in order to support natural traveling through the VE via a walking metaphor. Since the VE usually exceeds the dimension of the area in which the user can be tracked, we propose different strategies to map the user's movement into the virtual world intuitively. Moreover, commonly available devices and interaction techniques are presented for both-handed interaction to enrich the navigation process.