Building Metaphors for Supporting User Interaction with Multimedia Databases

Abstract

In this paper we discuss how metaphors for supporting user interaction with multimedia databases can be automatically generated. The work presented is a further step in the development of Virgilio, a Virtual Reality (VR) based system that has been designed to be a general purpose exploration tool for highly structured data. Virgilio visualizes the results of a query to a database by generating VR scenes, that exploit appropriate metaphors in order to take advantage of common knowledge about real world objects, thus reducing the cognitive load in the process of information assimilation. We analyze two specific components of the Virgilio architecture, the Query Management Tool and the Metaphor Definition Tool, and we identify a completely automatic procedure to define the metaphor that will be exploited in the construction of the VR scene. The implementation of this procedure exploits the backtracking search strategy of Prolog interpreters to solve a typical constraint satisfaction problem.

Is semitransparency useful for navigating virtual environments?

“…These problems become even more critical in the case of the growing number of VEs on the Web, where users are very likely to leave prematurely the site if they encounter usability problems. It is also interesting to note that, besides the traditional VR applications that include 3D models of cities and buildings, VEs based on architectural metaphors are being increasingly used to visualize abstract information in domains as diverse as computer networks [17], databases [6], e-commerce [5], information systems [9], operating systems [12], and program code [13]. As a consequence, the issue of 3D navigation of VEs is going to attract researchers who do not currently belong to the VR community.…”