A visual tool for tracing users' behavior in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Although some guidelines (e.g., based on architectural principles) have been proposed for designing Virtual Environments (VEs), several usability problems can be identified only by studying the behavior of real users in VEs. This paper proposes a tool, called VU-Flow, that is able to automatically record usage data of VEs and then visualize it in formats that make it easy for the VE designer to visually detect peculiar users' behaviors and thus better understand the effects of her design choices. In particular, the visualizations concern: i) the detailed paths followed by single users or groups of users in the VE, ii) areas of maximum (or minimum) users' flow, iii) the parts of the environment more seen (or less seen) by users, iv) detailed replay of users visits. We show examples of how these visualizations allow one to visually detect useful information such as the interests of users, navigation problems, users' visiting style. Although this paper describes how VU-Flow can be used in the context of VEs, it is interesting to note that the tool can be also applied to the study of users of location-aware mobile devices in physical environments.

An On-Line Classification Approach of Visitors’ Movements in 3D Virtual Museums

“…We, also, introduce the algorithms of generating the synthetic data of four visiting styles as defined in [5,10]. We, then, conduct an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) trained by the synthetic visitor data in the off-line stage and tested by the new visitor data in the on-line stage.…”

“…Chittaro and Ieronutti [10] described four visiting styles based on results from their visualization tool, where black highlights areas more traveled, white identifies the areas less traveled and different shades of gray are used to identify intermediate previous situations, as shown in Table 1. Corresponding to four visiting styles, the aforementioned researches [5,7,10] described them beneficial to a physical environment design in museums as shown in Table 1.…”

“…Corresponding to four visiting styles, the aforementioned researches [5,7,10] described them beneficial to a physical environment design in museums as shown in Table 1. Note that Fig.…”

“…Considering the visualization scheme of visiting styles in [10,12], we can discard the temporal information in trajectories data of visitor movement in a museum. Given a visit map, V , it is obvious that a dark colored area is a key role to identify the visiting styles because it illustrates a long stopover.…”

“…In this paper, we propose an on-line classification system of four visitor styles based on their definitions, which are summarized in [5,10]. This is based on our hypothesis that a visiting style can be simulated by using mathematic functions.…”