Metaphors for Supporting User Interaction with Multimedia Databases — A Demonstration

Abstract

This demonstration presents a prototype system in which metaphors for supporting user interaction with multimedia databases are automatically generated. Such a prototype 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. The demonstration outlines an example scenario that applies the Virgilio prototype with an electronic commerce application.