Visualizing retrieved information: a survey

Clearly, the presentation method for information retrieved from the global information infrastructure (GII) makes a big difference to users. The NCSA Mosaic interface, for example, with its point-and-click multimedia page presentation, swelled popular interest in the World Wide Web. This experience suggests the possibility of increased usefulness if we apply visualization techniques to information retrieved from the GII. Note that, although the term “information visualization” is coming into use, the goal is really “information perceptualization”. The latter implies a richer use of many senses, including sound and touch, to increase the rate at which people can assimilate and understand information. In discussing the visualization of retrieved information, it helps to consider four functional levels: (1) the infosphere, (2) the workspace, (3) sense-making tools, and (4) the document. This simple classification lets us separate the functions served by the visualizations from the techniques themselves, which can be applied across functional levels     

Infrastructure for science portals

A major driver of Internet growth has been the USA's decades-long national policy of funding basic research and infrastructure prototyping in its universities. This unique national system has enabled universities to experiment with capabilities years ahead of their mass commercial distribution. From Arpanet to NSFnet, this far-reaching partnership between government, universities and industry planted the seeds that grew into the modern cyberworld. More recently, NCSA Mosaic and NCSA's Web server software catalyzed the development of the World Wide Web. This “explore the future” methodology has been institutionalized in the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. Each PACI partnership brings together dozens of leading researchers at some 75 institutions to create the services necessary to prototype a seamless, integrated computational and collaborative environment known as the Grid     

Moving happily through the World Wide Web

Looks at some practical approaches to improving the process of interacting with information distributed over the global information infrastructure, specifically for the World Wide Web. The introduction of NCSA Mosaic changed the way we get information over the Web. With the click of a button, Mosaic's graphical user interface made it possible to browse and retrieve literally any information accessible through the Web. This is true if you know the document's Universal Resource Locator (URL), an identifier expressing its location. You type in this address and sooner or later (depending on document size and traffic at the time), the document appears on your screen. If you do not know the URL, or even which documents contain the requested information, you might want to browse or search the Web. Interacting with information on the Web starts with browsing and searching; continues with selecting, digesting and assimilating information; terminates with generating new information; and begins anew. The user's needs and desires must occupy center stage during development of Web systems and sites. The approach chosen should let users interact easily and effectively with the information contained throughout large arrays of documents. Visualization, computer graphics, and just plain common sense in designing Web pages and presenting information make the process better for users. This article discusses how to construct effective presentations (Web pages)     

Interactive customization of ubiquitous Web applications

Ubiquitous environments pose new challenges for end users who often need to access their applications from various devices. In this paper we present a solution that allows users to easily customise and migrate interactive web applications starting with an existing desktop version. This is obtained through an intelligent infrastructure that enables users to select the relevant part of an interactive Web application in order to create a mobile version and migrate it.     

Toward support for hypermedia on the World Wide Web

As organizations rush to embrace the World Wide Web as their primary application infrastructure, they should not bypass the benefit of hypermedia support. The Web's infrastructure can serve as an interface to all interactive applications and, over time, will become the graphical user interface model for new applications. Ubiquitous hypermedia support should become the jewel of the Web environment. Through Web integration, hypermedia could become an integral part of every interactive application. With the proper tools to support hypermedia in Web application development, it will become second nature for developers and individual authors to provide supplemental links and hypermedia navigation. However, as organizations adopt the Web as their primary application infrastructure, designers may use Java and other tools to recreate current application functionality, and not take advantage of the Web's hypermedia-augmented infrastructure. If users, designers, MIS departments and organizations don't demand hypermedia support, hypermedia may get lost in the frenzy of Web integration     

Multilingual information exchange through the World-Wide Web

Multilingual facilities are indispensable to make the World-Wide Web really worldwide. However, most of the current implementations of the WWW support only the Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) character set. This paper describes a method for exchanging multilingual information through the WWW, based on our experience on development of Multi-Localization Enhancement of NCSA Mosaic for X. Our experimental enhancement for Mosaic provides use of various national characters. This paper also describes future issues of multilingual information exchange through the WWW.     

Distributed shared memory infrastructure for virtual enterprise in building and construction

This paper proposes a new approach to building a virtual enterprise (VE) software infrastructure that offers persistence, concurrent access, coherence and security on a distributed datastore based on the distributed shared-memory paradigm. The platform presented, persistent distributed store (PerDiS), is demonstrated with test applications that show its suitability and adequate performance for the building and construction domain. In particular, the successful adaptation of standard data access interface (SDAI) to PerDiS and a comparison with CORBA are presented as examples of the potential of the distributed shared-memory paradigm for the VE environment.     

The physiological mirror—a system for unconscious control of a virtual environment through physiological activity

This paper introduces a system for real-time physiological measurement, analysis, and metaphorical visualization within a virtual environment (VE). Our goal is to develop a method that allows humans to unconsciously relate to parts of an environment more strongly than to others, purely induced by their own physiological responses to the virtual reality (VR) displays. In particular, we exploit heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response in order to control the behavior of virtual characters in the VE. Such unconscious processes may become a useful tool for storytelling or assist guiding participants through a sequence of tasks in order to make the application more interesting, e.g., in rehabilitation. We claim that anchoring of subjective bodily states to a virtual reality (VR) can enhance a person’s sense of realism of the VR and ultimately create a stronger relationship between humans and the VR.     

Study on interaction-induced symptoms with respect to virtual grasping and manipulation

Owing to the popularity of various hand tracking interfaces, there have been numerous applications developed to provide intuitive hand interaction with the virtual world. As users start with great anticipation, they end up with dissatisfaction due to difficulties of manipulation or physical tiredness coming very short. Although the task itself is rather trivial in a real life situation, it requires much effort in the virtual environment. We address this awkwardness as ‘VR interaction-induced fatigue symptom’ and hypothesize its causes based on our observations. We argue that the source of the fatigue comes from the restricted sensory information of the VR interfaces, and that users try to accommodate the missing sensory feedback by excessive motion leading to wrong posture or bad timing. We demonstrate our hypothesis by conducting experiments of two types of virtual interaction scenarios: object transport and 3D selection. Furthermore, by analyzing the behaviors of users' action collected from our experiment, we derive essential factors to be considered in designing VR applications, and propose a conceptual interaction model for orchestrating virtual grasping.     

Personalised e-learning through an educational virtual reality game using Web services

This paper describes how a personalised educational game architecture has been used in conjunction with Web services to provide remote access to the system. The educational game is a virtual reality adventure game that performs affective user modelling by measuring emotional characteristics of users. Virtual reality (VR) games are so popular among children and adolescents that can be used for the purposes of educational software to render it more attractive and motivating. The benefits of such an application can be maximised if it is available over the Web. Software applications that operate over the Web are targeted to a wide range of users. Hence they need a high degree of adaptivity and dynamic individualisation to each user that interacts with the application. This should include the students’ emotional state that affects their learning. However, the environment of a Web-based VR-game that performs user modelling is so demanding that the technology of Web services is necessary for its effective operation and interoperability. Moreover, reusability may be achieved for the user modelling component.

Tele-immersive product evaluation: a review and an implementation framework

A novel virtual tele-immersive product evaluation environment is conceived. The components for the tele-immersive virtual environment for product evaluation include a robust virtual reality (VR) hardware system, associated VR driving software, development tool for the tele-immersive virtual environment, networking software, user representation scheme and tools for developing 3D models and incorporating dynamic properties into the models. We have developed a model to allow users to collaboratively evaluate products using the CAVE^TM, Performer, CAVERN, CAVEActors, Pro/ENGINEER, and ADAMS.     

Perceiving affordances in virtual reality: influence of person and environmental properties in perception of standing on virtual grounds

We evaluated the perception of affordances in virtual environments (VE). In our work, we considered the affordances for standing on a virtual slanted surface. Participants were asked to judge whether a virtual slanted surface supported upright stance. The objective was to evaluate whether this perception was possible in virtual reality (VR) and comparable to previous works conducted in real environments. We found that the perception of affordances for standing on a slanted surface in virtual reality is possible and comparable (with an underestimation) to previous studies conducted in real environments. We also found that participants were able to extract and to use virtual information about friction in order to judge whether a slanted surface supported an upright stance. Finally, results revealed that the person’s position on the slanted surface is involved in the perception of affordances for standing on virtual grounds. Taken together, our results show quantitatively that the perception of affordances can be effective in virtual environments and influenced by both environmental and person properties. Such a perceptual evaluation of affordances in VR could guide VE designers to improve their designs and to better understand the effect of these designs on VE users.     

MobiTran:一种面向智能手机的PC版Web应用转化技术

随着移动互联网的快速发展,人们可以通过包括智能手机和平板电脑在内的移动计算设备来访问和使用Web应用。然而,目前已有的Web应用大多是针对PC设计的,因此通过移动计算设备直接访问时,可能出现信息显示不全、界面布局混乱、用户体验变差、需要耗费较多流量等问题。重新开发符合移动设备特性的Web应用是一种最直接的解决方案,但是开发成本和代价较大,并且同时维护PC版和移动版两个不同的应用版本也会带来更高的成本。提出一种面向开发者的Web应用移动版本半自动转化技术并实现了支持工具MobiTran:首先,对PC版本Web应用的界面进行自动转化,使之适应移动设备的屏幕尺寸;然后,通过支持开发者手工对界面的样式和布局进行修改,定制拆分子页面以控制数据流量,同时加入适应移动设备操控特点的元素;最终,生成一个供移动设备访问的移动版本Web应用。对主流网站的测试结果表明:MobiTran可以将原网页自动地转化为适合移动设备宽度的新网页,转化后的网页清晰无溢出并可以较大限度地维持新页面与原页面风格一致;在自动转化过程中,可以较少地丢失页面信息并较大限度地保证原页面的功能;转化后的新页面相比原页面消耗数据流量较小。     

虚拟教学环境中基于草图的自适应用户界面研究

将草图技术、自适应技术与传统的虚拟现实技术相结合应用于虚拟教学过程中,通过增强用户和系统之间个性化需求的交互处理来提高系统的智能性和友好性,进而有效提高虚拟教学环境的应用效果.旨在虚拟环境中构建基于草图的自适应用户界面并应用于虚拟教学来满足特定教学需求,着重结合实例分析了基于自适应草图用户界面的虚拟教学环境中的草图上下文处理机制.在上述研究基础上,设计开发了一个虚拟教学原型系统,实验证明该系统在用户体验上有明显的改善.     

Design evaluation and modification of mechanical systems in virtual environments

Design is one of the most important stages in the manufacturing cycle and influences all the subsequent stages of product development. In the context of today’s iterative design methodology, the modification of any design is a process involving many evaluations and improvements to the solutions chosen in earlier stages. For this purpose, in the most recent decade, 3D computer simulations have become common tools used within industry. Whilst virtual reality (VR) technology is seen as the interaction technology of the future, much of the current research in this area is carried out to explore the potential benefits and added value brought by the integration of this into standard software technologies currently used at various stages in manufacturing life cycle. A lot of attention has been given to exploring the usability and benefits of interactive VR for assembly planning, knowledge elicitation and design and simulation. However, little research has focussed on the analytical aspects of the design process, for example in the use of VR as an interface for simulation software in finite element methods and multi-body systems. This paper introduces research focussing on applications of virtual environments (VEs) for interactive design evaluation and modification adapted and used with standard simulation software. The use of such interactive visualisation offers the engineer more realistic real-time representations of the design and advanced facilities to interact with the model during the design process. While design evaluation is based mainly on visualisation; design modification requires interactive changes of the model during the simulation, and the interfaces described here highlights such applications. In this work, two software prototypes have been developed using VR technology. First, a software tool called design evaluation in virtual environments is presented together with an application in civil engineering to illustrate the mode of operation and added value of the use of an interactive visualisation environment. Linking the simulation software with the VE provides real time bi-directional communication of graphical information which can be successfully achieved even within the limits of current computer technology. The tool includes a suite of software modules and a user interface to facilitate the link between the simulation results and the VE. The second tool facilitates the design modification in virtual environments system by providing real time dynamic simulation. Two dynamic approaches are investigated in order to study the real time simulation issues in the context of design modification and system performance: the classic approach based on rigid interconnected bodies, and a new and novel approach developed by the authors based on particles dynamics. Both implementations have been tested and compared on a mechanism application under the same computing conditions. The research applications presented demonstrate the practicality, flexibility and versatility of the visualisation in virtual environment in design evaluation and modification. However, the computer efficiency whilst carrying out real time dynamic simulation is limiting the range of applications to models of moderate size; however, this is an improvement on previous similar applications.     

Improving Web interaction on small displays

Soon many people will retrieve information from the Web using handheld, palmsized or even smaller computers. Although these computers have dramatically increased in sophistication, their display size is — and will remain — much smaller than their conventional, desktop counterparts. Currently, browsers for these devices present Web pages without taking account of the very different display capabilities. As part of a collaborative project with Reuters, we carried out a study into the usability impact of small displays for retrieval tasks. Users of the small screen were 50% less effective in completing tasks than the large screen subjects. Small screen users used a very substantial number of scroll activities in attempting to complete the tasks. Our study also provided us with interesting insights into the shifts in approach users seem to make when using a small screen device for retrieval. These results suggest that the metaphors useful in a full screen desktop environment are not the most appropriate for the new devices. Design guidelines are discussed, here, proposing directed access methods for effective small screen interaction. In our ongoing work, we are developing such `meta-interfaces' which will sit between the small screen user and the `conventional' Web page.     

Alice: rapid prototyping for virtual reality

Virtual reality has sparked many people's imaginations, but writing VR programs remains difficult. Besides the obvious problems of managing arcane I/O devices (trackers, gloves, and so on), the programs must allow the participant to operate effectively in the immersive environment. Virtual environments present a new medium for both the participant and the programmer/author. In the University of Virginia's User Interface Group, we believe the best way to accelerate development in a new medium such as VR is to provide tools that allow people without highly technical backgrounds to create programs for it. These novice authors must be able to quickly try different nuances of an idea. They must be able to easily ask “what if” questions. To support this goal, we are developing Alice, a rapid prototyping environment that can generate VR environments. The name “Alice” honors Lewis Carroll's heroine, who explored a rapidly changing, dynamic environment     

Multiple decoupled interaction: An interaction design approach for groupware interaction in co-located virtual environments

Interactive visualizations such as virtual environments and their associated input and interface techniques have traditionally focused on localized single-user interactions and have lacked co-present active collaboration mechanisms where two or more co-located users can share and actively cooperate and interact with the visual simulation. VR facilities such as CAVEs or PowerWalls, among many others, seem to promise such collaboration but due to the special requirements in terms of 3D input and output devices and the physical configuration and layout, they are generally designed to support an active controlling participant—the immersed user—and a passive viewing only audience. In this paper we explore the integration of different technologies, such as small handheld devices and wireless networks with VR/VEs in order to develop a technical and conceptual interaction approach that allows creation of a more ad hoc, interaction rich, multimodal and multi-device environment, where multiple users can access certain interactive capabilities of VE and support co-located collaboration.