About this Project

A sense of spatial presence as a feeling of “being there” is an important part of the virtual experience. Navigation is a fundamental task in virtual environments and the specific navigation methods that are employed influence a user’s sense of presence.

In this project we investigate how different metaphors for vertical navigation impact spatial presence. We introduce a new elevator metaphor for vertical navigation in virtual environments which includes a multimodal simulation.

In a user study our approach is compared to the existing flying and teleportation metaphors with respect to spatial presence, comfort, real world awareness and other parameters. The results show that our elevator simulation increases the sense of presence and is more natural and realistic for vertical navigation in multilevel virtual environments than previous methods.