We've experimented with this navigational problem in developing
GopherVR. There's a distinct advantage of restricting the axis of
movement in a scene including:
1) People are most comfortable navigating in ways that have real
world counterparts, walking, driving a car, and jumping.
2) Most folks are pretty bad at zero-gravity navigation
(i.e. unrestricted navigation in all axis.)
3) You might think flying is the way to go, but even folks that do
know how to fly a plane rarely do aerial acrobatics.
There are a number of things that can be done to improve the quality
of scenes that are rendered in VRML.
1) All scenes should adhere to a standard reference model, in size
and orientation. We already have the size (1 == 1 meter) The
orientation can take the form of a default camera viewing
position that you get when you open a VRML document.
As Eric stated above, you should have a return to the initial
viewpoint option in your 3d browser (we have one in GopherVR,
very handy...)
2) Most displayable stuff should be kept on top of some kind of
'ground' plane. This gives us a place to plant our feet, so
we're not adrift in space.
It's very difficult to walk without ground beneath our feet, or a
horizon in the distance.
In fact, I think there should *always* be a ground plane of some
sort.
-- | Paul Lindner | [email protected] | Slipping into madness | | Distributed Computing Services | is good for the sake | Gophermaster | University of Minnesota | of comparison. ///// / / / /////// / / / / / / / / //// / / / / / / / /