title: VU-flow: a visualization tool for analyzing navigation in virtual environments.
abstract: This paper presents a tool for the visual analysis of navigation patterns of moving entities, such as users, virtual characters, or vehicles in 3D Virtual Environments (VEs). The tool, called VU-Flow, provides a set of interactive visualizations that highlight interesting navigation behaviors of single or groups of moving entities that were the VE together or separately. The visualizations help to improve the design of VEs and to study the navigation behavior of users, e.g., during controlled experiments. Besides VEs, the proposed techniques could also be applied to visualize real-world data recorded by positioning systems, allowing one to employ VU-Flow in domains such as urban planning, transportation, and emergency response.
authors.affiliation: Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Department of Math and Computer Science, University of Udine, Italy. chittaro@dimi.uniud.it
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chittaro
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ranon
authors.forename: Lucio
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ieronutti
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface