ScaleCue-WIM: Boundary-Controlled WIM Scaling for Scale-Aware Navigation in Multiscale Virtual Environments Inproceedings

Junkun Long, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Pan Hui, Hai-Ning Liang

Abstract:

Navigation in multiscale virtual environments (MSVEs) requires users to maintain not only spatial awareness, but also awareness of the scale at which objects and regions are being inspected. We present ScaleCue-WIM, a Virtual Reality (VR) World-in-Miniature (WIM)-based preview technique for scale-aware navigation. Rather than directly changing the user's immersive viewpoint while scaling, ScaleCue-WIM lets users configure a target view---its level of scale, position, and viewing direction---in a WIM and then teleport to the corresponding immersive view. Prior WIM-based approaches have incorporated scale cues mainly as visual references while leaving scaling as a free, continuous adjustment. ScaleCue-WIM instead makes these cues operational boundaries that organize automatic WIM transitions during preview configuration. It uses a Scale-Frame at the WIM's geometric center as an extent-selection tool. Users first place an object or region at this scale center, then resize the Scale-Frame to select an extent; reaching a Semantic Box, Numerical Box, or the WIM frame triggers an automatic WIM preview transition. Semantic and Numerical Boxes delimit the automatic WIM transitions encountered during preview configuration, making those boundary-triggered scale changes bounded, controlled, and interpretable. Once the preview represents the intended view, users commit it by teleporting into the corresponding immersive scene state. We evaluated ScaleCue-WIM in a 24-participant within-subjects study against Cue-Augmented Scaled and Scrolling WIM (CASSWIM). Compared with CASSWIM, ScaleCue-WIM reduced completion time and scale-operation count and yielded stronger perceived scale support. These results indicate that integrating scale cues into a boundary-controlled WIM preview-and-teleport workflow can support guided cross-scale route execution more effectively than presenting comparable cues alongside continuous WIM preview scaling.

Date of publication: Nov - 2026
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