VR-Net

Searching for a Virtual Reality Internet

David Cleary & Diarmuid O'Donoghue

Check out the following virtual worlds (in VRML 2.0), generated using VR-Net. VR-Net searches for inter-linked clusters of web pages - displaying them in a (desktop) virtual environment.

  1. Search on "Bill Clinton" and the resultant Bill Clinton world
  2. Search on "CORBA Interface Repository" and the resultant Corba Interface Repository world
  3. Search on "Internet 2000" and the resultant Internet 2000 world
Here are some screen-shots from VR-Net - taken from the "Bill Clinton" search above.

The main view of the search results - click for more a detailed view.
 
 

Overhead view of the information clusters
 
 

Close up of the White House cluster.
 

Selected Publications

Cleary, D. O'Donoghue, D."Generating a Topically Focused Virtual-Reality Internet", INET 2000 - 10th Annual Internet Society Conference, Yokohama, Japan, 18-21 July, 2000.

Abstract: Surveys highlight that Internet users are frequently frustrated by failing to locate useful information, and by difficulty in browsing anarchically linked Web structures. We present a new Internet browsing application (called VR-net) that addresses these problems. It first identifies semantic domains consisting of tightly interconnected Web-page groupings. Then it populates a 3D virtual world with these information sources, representing all relevant pages plus appropriate structural relations. Users can then easily browse through and around a semantically focused virtual library.