iWalk

Abstract

In this work, we present iWalk, a multimedia exploration tool that provides an interactive virtual environment for physically exploring geo-tagged data. This tool is flexible enough for users to easily explore their own collections, or existing collections from the web. Two interaction modalities are incorporated into our tool -movement and gesture. Movement (walking around the physical space) is used to intuitively move through the digital data space of a collection. Gesture is used for direct data manipulation; the user is able to select the mapping between gestures and interactions. In addition, we also provide functionality for exploring data that is not geo-located. Here the user defines a rough mapping between the data collection space and the physical interaction space and then operates the program as usual. We have currently tested the system on three different data sets -a large collection of geo-tagged photographs from Flickr, a geo-located sound collection, and a museum collection that is not geo-located.