Exact and heuristic path planning methods for a virtual environment

Path planning belongs to the best-known and well explored problems in computer science. However, in today’s real-time and dynamic applications, such as virtual reality, existing algorithms for static environment are considerably insufficient and, surprisingly, almost no attention is given to techniques for dynamic graphs. This paper introduces two methods to plan a path in an undirected graph with evaluated nodes whose value can vary in time: a simple modification of Dijkstra’s algorithm to find an optimal path while processing considerably less nodes than the standard Dijkstra’s algorithm and a heuristic method to find a suboptimal path while processing even smaller amount of nodes. The heuristic was developed for a virtual reality path planning application but its use is more general.