Automatic Spatial Exploration Schemes

Virtual reality applications have a huge potential to serve as a universal platform for communication and digital content management. In this chapter, we address the problem of generating navigation paths within VR spaces in an automated way. As shown by several authors in the past, such navigation paths can help guide users’ attention in high information density 3D environments. We break down the problem of generating such paths into the problem of clustering 2D displays within the spaces, and argue that such cluster information can serve as useful cues for point of interest (POI) generation. To solve the problem of clustering displays, we propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo based method, and evaluate a first implementation of the approach in the context of 3D spaces available on the MaxWhere platform.