Virtual Portals
In this project we introduced the concept of virtual portals for traveling through immersive virtual environments (IVEs). Virtual portals are three-dimensional doorways that connect one virtual location with another and can be entered by users in order to get to that place and back. Besides connecting different locations in the same virtual environment (VE), portals can also provide doorways between different VEs. The transition with virtual portals between two environments is intuitive, since users just walk from one region through a virtual doorway into another region. The implementation of virtual portals is based on the intention to present a virtual workspace to users as a persistent and continuous world in order to minimize breaks in the users' subjective sense of feeling present in the virtual world, which usually occur during abrupt teleportation. We performed experiments which have shown that virtual portals can enhance a user's sense of presence, and enable users to transfer space perception skills from one environment to another, since the portals preserve spatial coherence between the two environments.
Awards
The novel idea to leverage portals for traveling in IVEs has been honored with the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) in 2009.