Information Management Using Virtual Reality-Based Visualizations

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on information management using virtual reality (VR)-based visualizations. Recent advances in virtual reality technology suggest that encoding subsets of the information using multimedia techniques and placing the resulting visualizations into a perceptual three-dimensional space increase the amount of information that people can meaningfully manage. This chapter describes the problems that must be addressed to exploit VR technology for information management. It first describes the problems and solutions from a theoretical standpoint, and then describes how the solutions have been implemented in research prototypes. Even if appropriate visualizations can be found for individual elements, just too many pieces of information are available to be able to see all at once. The general solution to this problem is to develop models of degrees of interest (DOI) or fish-eye views. Fish-eye views contain a mixture of objects with high and low levels of detail. The DOI model associates two values with each object, semantic distance and a priori importance (API).