Choosing a Selection Technique for a Virtual Environment

Bearing in mind the difficulty required to create virtual environments, a platform for Setting-up Interactive Virtual Environments (pSIVE) was created to help non-specialists benefit from virtual applications involving virtual tours where users may interact with elements of the environment to extract contextual information. The platform allows creating virtual environments and setting up their aspects, interaction methods and hardware to be used. The construction of the world is done by loading 3D models and associating multimedia information (videos, texts or PDF documents) to them. A central interaction task in the envisioned applications of pSIVE is the selection of objects that have associated multimedia information. Thus, a comparative study between two variants of the ray-tracing selection technique was performed. The study also demonstrates the flexibility of the platform, since it was easily adapted to serve as a test environment.