UrbanRama: Navigating Cities in Virtual Reality
Shaoyu Chen, Fabio Miranda, Nivan Ferreira, Marcos Lage, Harish, Doraiswamy, Corinne Brenner, Connor Defanti, Michael Koutsoubis, Luc Wilson,, Ken Perlin, Claudio Silva

TL;DR
UrbanRama introduces a VR navigation system that combines local and global city views through environment warping, reducing perspective switching and aiding urban exploration and planning.
Contribution
We developed a novel VR interface with environment warping to seamlessly integrate local and global city views, validated through user studies.
Findings
Reduces the need for perspective switching
Maintains accurate distance and orientation perception
Enhances user experience in city exploration
Abstract
Exploring large virtual environments, such as cities, is a central task in several domains, such as gaming and urban planning. VR systems can greatly help this task by providing an immersive experience; however, a common issue with viewing and navigating a city in the traditional sense is that users can either obtain a local or a global view, but not both at the same time, requiring them to continuously switch between perspectives, losing context and distracting them from their analysis. In this paper, our goal is to allow users to navigate to points of interest without changing perspectives. To accomplish this, we design an intuitive navigation interface that takes advantage of the strong sense of spatial presence provided by VR. We supplement this interface with a perspective that warps the environment, called UrbanRama, based on a cylindrical projection, providing a mix of local and…
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