Navigating in virtual environments with 360° omnidirectional rendering

Typical field-of-view (fov) of visual feedback in virtual reality applications is generally limited. In some cases, e.g. in videogames, the provided fov can be artificially increased, using simple perspective projection methods. In this paper, we design and evaluate different visualization techniques, inspired by the cartography domain, for navigating in virtual environments (VE) with a 360° horizontal fov of the scene. We have conducted an evaluation of different methods compared to a rendering method of reference, i.e. a perspective projection, in a basic navigation task. Our results confirm that using any omnidirectional rendering method could lead to more efficient navigation in terms of average task completion time. Among the different 360° projection methods, the subjective preference was significantly given to a cylindrical projection method (equirectangular). Taken together, our results suggest that omnidirectional rendering could be used in virtual reality applications in which fast navigation or full and rapid visual exploration are important. They pave the way to novel kinds of visual cues and visual rendering methods in virtual reality.