A Tunnel Window and Its Variations: Seamless Teleportation Techniques in a Virtual Environment

This paper proposes a tunnel window, a versatile three dimensional interaction technique, for both navigation and remote object manipulation in a large scale virtual environment. A tunnel window, which is created at an arbitrary position in space using a set of hand gesture commands, provides a secondary view whose viewpoint can be controlled independently from that of the primary view. A tunnel window allows various kinds of seamless teleportation operations including teleportation of the user’s viewpoint and that of a virtual object from one position to another by simply passing through the window frame. To extend the interaction scheme, a variety of transformation combinations of the relevant coordinate systems, i.e. those of a user, a window frame, and primary and secondary scenes, have been considered. This paper describes basic concepts and design of a tunnel window interface, its implementation, and variations of the tunnel window scheme.