Automatic portals layout for VR navigation

Portals layout in a large virtual scene can help users improve navigation efficiency, but determining the number and the positions of the portals has some challenges. In this paper, we propose two automatic virtual portals layout methods for efficient VR navigation. We first introduced a visibility importance-based method to determine the portals’ positions and numbers for a given scene. To improve the walkability of the VR environment, based on the visibility importance-based method, we propose a simulated annealing-based portal layout method to optimize the portals’ positions further. To reduce the number of reverse redirections in the navigation, we also proposed a real-time portal orientation determination algorithm to determine the orientations of the portals. We designed a user study to test the two methods we propose. The results showed that our methods made the VR navigation more efficient than the portals random layout and non-portal methods. Our methods achieved a significant reduction of task completion time, total viewpoint translation, and the number of reverse path redirections without increasing the scores of SSQ, IPQ, and task load.