US Patent 7646394 System and method for operating in a virtual environment

The present invention relates to a system, method and computer program product for enabling user interaction with objects in a virtual environment independently of apparent virtual viewpoint altitude, by non-linearly scaling the virtual actuator. In doing so, the system receives a virtual-viewpoint position and a virtual actuator position from a virtual environment processing subsystem, and a real-viewpoint position and a real-actuator position from a real-world environment tracking subsystem. An xy-scale factor is then calculated based on the virtual-viewpoint position. A non-linear mapping is thereafter calculated between a real dataset and a virtual dataset based on the xy-scale-factor. The real dataset comprises the real-actuator position and the real-viewpoint position in the real-world environment, and the virtual dataset comprises the virtual-actuator position and the virtual-viewpoint position in the virtual environment.