Abstract:

Navigation in Virtual Reality is a complex experience which depends on the aesthetic, objectives and interactivity of the content. Nevertheless, one can still make distinctions with regards to how one may navigate between Virtual Reality experiences.

Virtual Reality creates many new challenges for interface design. It is highly graphic and interactive. Current graphical displays of consumer available headsets range up to two 4K UHD displays with refresh rates of up to 144 Hz. More importantly, its interactive systems are extremely powerful, ranging from sitting by virtual campfires to drawing one's own complex three-dimensional imagery. In addition to these major challenges, VR browsers must also contend with poorly-engineered content and users having hazardous physical reactions to experiences. Nevertheless, unlike "flat" CGI animation, Virtual Reality relies on user position and provides considerable consistency in the outer bounds of the content, such as the visibility limit and movement limit.

In this paper, the visibility limit of Virtual Reality is taken advantage of to produce a global navigation architecture for every virtual experience. This architecture, called the Hop Portal, is a design for displaying Virtual Reality content homogeneously and beautifully, essentially integrating theoretical physics and concepts of multi-dimensionality. This paper continues to compare the Hop Portal to an idealized basic Virtual Reality architecture. It shows how to generate the Hop Portal to elegantly display additional metadata. Additionally, it shows how to apply the Hop Portal to a search engine and a web browser.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, VR, Navigation.