An Approach to Information Presentation Employing Game Principles and Physics Based Interaction

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we propose a novel approach optimized towards the presentation of general sets of information entities that employs game-like features and social context to engage its users to explore the presented data and streamlines the navigation and overall usability in terms of several constraints that we established. The presentation environment is embedded within a physical engine that controls the movement of visualized entities, resolves user's interaction and takes part in the overall information throughput.Keywords: web information entities visualization, exploratory navigation, game-like, physics based interaction. Visualization ConceptThe times when the web content was composed mostly of textual HTML-based websites are long gone. With some popular technologies like HTML5 the web has become a highly visual medium. However, the mere fact that the information is communicated by a visual presentation does not solve any of the major problems of crowded and boring 1.0 websites. We need to utilize the power of the new web to ease the information retrieval. The current information visualizations are often ontology based visualizations utilizing hierarchical navigation [1], graphs [2] and various aspects of information space [3]. Their disadvantages are excessive complexity or lack of scalability.We propose a novel approach to presentation of general sets of information entities. We map the data entities on graph nodes, embedded in 3D space with edges visually encoded in spatial composition (see Fig 1). To engage the users we use gamelike features [4] and to meet the navigating, filtering and clustering requirements we embed the presentation space with physical engine. The basic requirement of the dynamic information presentation is to simplify exploration of complex informational structures. To improve the clarity, it is necessary to extract and present the most important information and use presentation techniques that ease the information navigation. It is also important to offer an environment, which has serious character and forces user's imagination to improve the domain space in a user's personal way. Our idea is to visualize multimedia with attributes, where the focus lies on the most important attribute leading to the reduced complexity of domain space.