Motion Planning for Camera Movements in Virtual Environments

摘要

When users navigate through a virtual environment they often directly control the camera. Such direct control is dicult for inexperienced users and results in rather ugly camera motions that easily lead to motion sickness. In this paper we describe a new tech-nique for automatic generation of camera motion using motion planning techniques from robotics. In this approach the user simply species a required goal position (and orienta-tion) using e.g. a map, and the system automatically computes a smooth camera motion from the current position and orientation to the required position (and orientation). As preprocessing the approach uses the probabilistic roadmap method to compute a roadmap through the environment. When a camera motion is required a path is obtained from the roadmap which is then improved by various smoothing techniques to satisfy camera con-straints. The method has successfully been integrated in a system for walkthroughs in architectural designs and urban planning. 1