The World in Miniature (WIM) metaphor allows users to interact and travel efficiently in virtual environments. In addition to the first-person perspective offered by typical VR applications, the WIM offers a second dynamic viewpoint through a hand-held miniature copy of the virtual environment. In the original WIM paper the miniature was a scaled down replica of the whole environment, thus limiting the technique to simple models being manipulated at a single level of scale. Several WIM extensions have been proposed where the replica shows only a part of the virtual environment. In this paper we present an improved visualization of WIM that supports arbitrarily-complex, densely-occluded scenes. In particular, we discuss algorithms for selecting the region of the virtual environment which will be covered by the miniature copy and efficient algorithms for handling 3D occlusion from an exocentric viewpoint.

Peer Reviewed