Navigation and visualization techniques: A case study in VRML.
A sea of data engulfs and sinks today's user in ambiguity and indecisiveness. Few can swim and fewer can effectively surf the Internet, a vast and daily growing store house of data. Almost any desktop computer can instantaneously access this enormous unstructured and mostly redundant informatio...
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University of Ottawa (Canada)
2009
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10393/4289 http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-13677 |
| Summary: | A sea of data engulfs and sinks today's user in ambiguity and indecisiveness. Few can swim and fewer can effectively surf the Internet, a vast and daily growing store house of data. Almost any desktop computer can instantaneously access this enormous unstructured and mostly redundant information. The earliest user interface consisted of page after page of unformatted text--a typical two-dimensional (2D) interface. Using links, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) excelled in presenting 2D interface on the World Wide Web (Web), indeed, HTML is still almost all-pervasive on the Web. Two-dimensional textual interfaces are limiting: navigation is left to right, top to bottom with discontinuity from line to line, an interface tightly linked to the advent of printed material. On the other hand an ideal interface will simulate a human interface with navigation, motion, touch, feel and perception. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) emerged as a new three-dimensional (3D) standard for representing 3D objects on the Web. With its latest release, "VRML 2.0" (also known as VRML 97) supports behavior including animation in 3D space triggered by events such as mouse actions. VRML blends space and time with user interface interaction and support for scripting languages. This thesis addresses navigation and data visualization using VRML both for physical activities (such as visiting a museum) and for representation of statistical data (such as electoral results). The principal contribution of this thesis is to create 3D interfaces to visualize complex data extracted from live databases on different servers across the Internet. This is realized by means of four experiments which I designed and implemented in VRML. Each experiment covers a different aspect of navigation and visualization. |
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