Automatic Formation Generation Based on Scene Awareness for Guided Group Navigation in VR

Group navigation is a virtual reality (VR) technology designed to replace personal navigation, enhancing efficiency and aiding guided tours in path planning for other users. Group navigation techniques require users to have a clear understanding of navigation and travel modalities. Tour guides must ensure that users do not intersect with the environment or other users' models and must provide reasonable tour formations. To address these needs, we propose a scene-aware automatic formation generation method for fast and easy-to-use guided tours. First, we generate a limited number of candidate points for the exhibition and initialize the visiting group formation. Next, we optimize the formation to maximize view quality using our proposed viewpoint observation score. Finally, we match the visitors to the optimized formation to ensure a minimal view deflection angle. Moreover, we conducted a user study to evaluate the performance of our approach. Compared to the current method, our approach significantly increased navigation efficiency and view quality. Additionally, it substantially decreased the task load and improved the system usability for both tour guides and visitors.