Virtual Reality for Image Retrieval

Image database systems have been widely studied in the last years. Having to deal with visual information, a great effort has also been put in designing and implementing user interfaces for the different retrieval engines. Most of those interfaces allow the user to specify the query through visual examples, either by feeding a complete image to the system or by drawing some colour patches on a sketchpad. However, in fields such as education or entertainment, some new user interfaces can be developed exploiting Virtual Reality solutions. Virtual Reality provides us with a wide set of previously unexplored interaction techniques, among which we can choose the ones that are best suited for our purposes. In the application presented hereafter, while navigating a virtual world, the user is given the opportunity of taking some photographs, which can be used to query a database of images.