Octree-based camera planning in virtual environments

When people navigate through virtual environments, they often manually control the camera, which may result in dizzy camera motions. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm for camera planning in virtual environments, which will complete path planning, trajectory planning and orientation planning of virtual camera for the user with desired aesthetic qualities, while the user simply specifies the goal position. The path planning part of the algorithm is based on octree representation of the scene, associating with some ideas from visibility graph. It is more efficient and the resulting path is suitable for camera motion. We also describe an innovative approach for path smoothing and camera speed control in sharp turns, which strengthens the aesthetic effect with little overhead.

1. Introduction

Navigating in virtual environments is one of the key issues in research of virtual reality. Traditional applications often directly control the camera, which may result in swinging, jittering, bad path, rough orientation change and other fault For example, a wrong path may make the camera move into the internal of a solid, which is not possible in real world. Camera planning is used for automatically controlling the position and orientation of virtual camera, for properly navigating through virtual environments. There is considerable work in improving the user interface of virtual navigation [12].