Cognitive Aspects of 2D Content Integration and Management in 3D Virtual Reality Spaces

Abstract

The advent of 2D graphical user interfaces in the 1980s shifted user interactions from line-based terminals to icon-based interfaces. As smartphones emerged in the 2010s, portable 2D graphical interfaces became a reality, liberating users from being confined to a single location when accessing digital services. These transformations have profoundly altered our understanding of digital information systems, with impacts that cannot be easily quantified. Current advancements in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) are on the verge of ushering in the next significant leap in cognitive expansion, introducing portable and highly contextual spatial interfaces, also sometimes referred to as Digital Realities (DRs). As a result, users now anticipate the ability to engage with an increasing array and variety of digital content in ways that are more contextualized and tailored to their needs, taking into account factors such as time, location, personalized goals and user-specific histories. In this paper, we aim to give an overview of cognitive aspects relevant to content integration and management specifically in DR environments, and to propose solutions and / or best practices to address them. Our discussion is centered around a paradigm called the Doing When-Seeing (DWS) paradigm, which we propose for the design of Digital Reality interfaces. We demonstrate the applicability of this paradigm to the design of interfaces for creating content, organizing content, and semantically representing and retreiving content within 3D Digital Reality environments.