Marking the City - Interactions in Multiple Space Scales in Virtual Reality.

This article shows an overview of an immersive VR application to explore, to analyze and to mark large-scale photogrammetric 3D models. The objective is to interrogate the effectiveness of the proposed navigation process and annotation tools for spatial understanding. Due to the amount of interactions, different kinds of menus were necessary: desktop coordination menu, radial menu attached to the controller and 3D spatial menu for creating markers. Besides the menus, the navigation tasks through different perception space scales required a great number of interactions metaphors, patterns and techniques displaying the complexity of the user experience in Virtual Reality for understanding and analyzing urban digital twins. Those interactions allowed by the user interface were then analysed and classifyed according to a theoretical background and were experimented in preliminary tests with end users. Although designed for particular needs of the army, the tools and interactions can be adapted for city models explorations and urban planning. For future steps of the research, a usability study is going to be performed to test the performance of the interface and to have more end users feedback.