TENETvr: Comprehensible Temporal Teleportation in Time-Varying Virtual Environments

The iterative design process of virtual environments commonly generates a history of revisions that each represent the state of the scene at a different point in time. Browsing through these discrete time points by common temporal navigation interfaces like time sliders, however, can be inaccurate and lead to an uncomfortably high number of visual changes in a short time. In this paper, we therefore present a novel technique called TENETvr (Temporal Exploration and Navigation in virtual Environments via Teleportation) that allows for efficient teleportation-based travel to time points in which a particular object of interest changed. Unlike previous systems, we suggest that changes affecting other objects in the same time span should also be mediated before the teleport to improve predictability. We therefore propose visualizations for nine different types of additions, property changes, and deletions. In a formal user study with 20 participants, we confirmed that this addition leads to significantly more efficient change detection, lower task loads, and higher usability ratings, therefore reducing temporal disorientation.