Narrative Navigation in Virtual Reality - A study on the simplification of interactions in a virtual environment

Virtual Reality is a powerful, although still fairly new, medium; its immersion and involvement capability is particularly useful in the cultural heritage domain, where it can be used to visualize places or artifacts long gone. However, its employment in museums has brought a problem to light: how to design an interface simple enough to be easily used even by someone who has never experienced Virtual Reality before, which is the case with a fair number of museum-goers. This thesis examines the most common interfaces for heritage VR applications, paying particular attention to the navigation system, in relation to the Finnish Pavilion project (a virtual interactive reconstruction currently on show in the Design Museum of Helsinki). It also reflects on the possibility of introducing a narrative in the installation. It is true that every navigation metaphor is strictly connected to the environment and the purpose of the VR application. For this particular installation, the teleportation was chosen. With the idea of intuitiveness and, when possible, the use of established designs, I developed three prototypes: an automatic one, a controlled one and a GUI-based one. To verify the efficacy of the prototypes, user tests were conducted at the Museum.