VR-VIBE: A Virtual Environment for Co-operative Information Retrieval

Abstract

We present a virtual reality application called VR-VIBE which is intended to support the co-operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR-VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR-VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co-operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR-VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting.