| | This Article | |
| |
| |
| | Share | |
| |
| |
| | Bibliographic References | |
| |
| |
| | Add to: | |
| |
 Digg
 Furl
 Spurl
 Blink
 Simpy
 Google
 Del.icio.us
 Y!MyWeb
| |
| | Search | |
| |
| |
| | |
VU-Flow: A Visualization Tool for Analyzing Navigation in Virtual Environments
November/December 2006 (vol. 12 no. 6)
pp. 1475-1485
Abstract—This paper presents a tool for the visual analysis of navigation patterns of moving entities, such as users, virtual characters, or vehicles in 3D Virtual Environments (VEs). The tool, called VU-Flow, provides a set of interactive visualizations that highlight interesting navigation behaviors of single or groups of moving entities that were the VE together or separately. The visualizations help to improve the design of VEs and to study the navigation behavior of users, e.g., during controlled experiments. Besides VEs, the proposed techniques could also be applied to visualize real-world data recorded by positioning systems, allowing one to employ VU-Flow in domains such as urban planning, transportation, and emergency response.
[1] E.H. Chi, “Improving Web Usability through Visualization,” IEEE Internet Computing, no. 2, pp. 64-71, 2002.
[2] J. Brainerd and B. Becker, “Case Study: E-Commerce Clickstream Visualization,” Proc. IEEE Symp. Information Visualization, pp. 153-158, 2001.
[3] I. Cadez, D. Heckerman, C. Meek, P. Smyth, and S. White, “Visualization of Navigation Patterns on a Web Site Using Model-Based Clustering,” Proc. Sixth ACM SIGKDD Int'l Conf. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 280-284, 2000.
[4] E. Herder and H. Weinreich, “Interactive Web Usage Mining with the Navigation Visualizer,” Proc. Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), pp. 1451-1454, 2005.
[5] K. Börner and S. Penumarthy, “Social Diffusion Patterns in Three-Dimensional Virtual Worlds,” Information Visualization, vol. 2, pp.182-198, 2003.
[6] N. Hoobler, G. Humhpreys, and M. Agrawala, “Visualizing Competitive Behaviors in MutliUser Virtual Environments,” Proc. IEEE Visualization Conf., pp. 163-170, 2004.
[7] L. Chittaro and L. Ieronutti, “A Visual Tool for Tracing Behaviors of Users in Virtual Environments,” Proc. Seventh Int'l Conf. Advanced Visual Interfaces, pp. 40-47, 2004.
[8] L. Ieronutti, R. Ranon, and L. Chittaro, “High-Level Visualization of Users' Navigation in Virtual Environments,” Proc. 10th IFIP Int'l Conf. Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 873-885, 2005.
[9] ActiveWorlds Web site, http:/www.activeworlds.com/, Mar. 2006.
[10] VRML, ISO/IEC 14772-2:2004, http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/ vrml/ISO-IEC-14772-IS-VRML97WithAmend ment1 #ISO_IEC_14772Part2, Mar. 2006.
[11] X3D, ISO/IEC FDIS 19775, http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifi cations index.html, Mar. 2006.
[12] J.J. Kuffner, “Goal-Directed Navigation for Animated Characters Using Real-Time Path Planning and Control,” Proc. Int'l Workshop Modeling and Motion Capture Techniques for Virtual Environments, pp. 171-186, 1998.
[13] L. Ieronutti, R. Ranon, and L. Chittaro, “Automatic Derivation of Electronic Maps from X3D/VRML Worlds,” Proc. Ninth Int'l Conf. 3D Web Technology, pp. 61-70, 2004.
[14] L. Chittaro, L. Ieronutti, and R. Ranon, “Navigating 3D Virtual Environments by Following Embodied Agents: A Proposal and Its Informal Evaluation on a Virtual Museum Application,” Psychnology J., vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 24-42, 2004.
[15] T. Hägerstrand, “What about People in Regional Science?” Papers of the Regional Science Assoc., vol. 24, pp. 7-21, 1970.
[16] H.J. Miller, “A Measurement Theory for Time Geography,” Geographical Analysis, vol. 37, pp. 17-45, 2005.
[17] R.S. Laramee, H. Hauser, H. Doleisch, B. Vrolijk, F.H. Post, and D. Weiskopf, “The State of the Art in Flow Visualization: Dense and Texture-Based Techniques,” Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 203-222, 2004.
[18] C.P. Risquet and H. Theisel, “Enhanced Integrate and Draw with Feature Visualization,” Rostocker Informatik-Berichte, vol. 22, pp.53-65, 1998.
[19] P. Schulze-Wollgast, C. Tominski, and H. Schumann, “Enhancing Visual Exploration by Appropriate Color Coding,” Proc. 13th Int'l Conf. Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision, pp. 203-210, 2005.
[20] Udine3D Web site, http:/udine3d.uniud.it, Mar. 2006.
Index Terms:
Information visualization, virtual reality, evaluation/methodology, visualization systems and software.
Citation:
Luca Chittaro, Roberto Ranon, Lucio Ieronutti, "VU-Flow: A Visualization Tool for Analyzing Navigation in Virtual Environments," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 1475-1485, Nov./Dec. 2006, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2006.109
