A Testbed for Rapid Design and Evaluation of VR Navigation Techniques for Industrial Applications

VR is making inroads into industrial applications, especially in product design and presentation, training and simulation use cases. A focus of these applications is on the visualization, exploiting 3D immersive graphics as a central feature of VR. While navigation is often required in these applications to select a suitable location for observing the visualization or interacting with the simulation content it is not in the focus of the designers, often leading to the selection of techniques that are convenient during development because they are available in the implementation toolkit. However, these may be less than ideal for the industrial application context. A large variety of VR techniques for navigation have been proposed in the literature and implemented, both for motion control and guidance, but there is currently little established knowledge on their respective benefits and shortcoming, especially in non-gaming applications. To enable designers of industrial VR environments to make informed choices of navigation techniques we present a testbed that enables quick prototyping and comparative evaluation in the specific application context and with the intended target audience, making a user centered selection of navigation techniques viable.