VRowser: A Virtual Reality Parallel Web Browser
Abstract
In this paper, we propose VRowser, which is a virtual reality (VR) web browser that utilizes various visualization and interaction methods to support webpage content comparisons, allocation, grouping, and retrieval that are essential of parallel web browsing. VRowser’s main design objective is to embody a VR parallel web browsing environment that maintains familiar web browsing metaphors and leverages virtual reality interaction and visualization capabilities to support parallel web browsing tasks. Thus, our approach retains the following design factors: (1) Immersive VR. (2) Maintaining document-based web browsing metaphor within the VR environment. (3) Segregated interaction methods for 3D and web-tasks. We present our prototype specifications, followed by an evaluation. Our user study essentially gauged participants’ impressions about VRowser, as well as their webpage placement strategies within two different VR environments. The results indicate that users heavily relied on environmental landmarks, such as trees or furniture, to facilitate placement and retrieval of webpages. While the locomotion method developed in our prototype proven to be inefficient for quickly travelling from one location to another. Lastly, we present our conclusion and future development direction of our work.
Keywords
Virtual reality Parallel web browsing Information spaceReferences
- 1.AlSada, M., Nakajima, T.: Parallel web browsing in tangible augmented reality environments. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2015), pp. 953–958 (2015)Google Scholar
- 2.Balakrishnan, R.: A study of tabbed browsing among Mozilla Firefox users. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 673–682 (2010)Google Scholar
- 3.Barsoum, E., Kuester, F.: Towards adaptive Web scriptable user interfaces for virtual environments. Virtual Real. 12(1), 55–64 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 4.Benford, S., Snowdon, D., Brown, C., Reynard, G., Ingram, R.: The populated web: browsing, searching and inhabiting the WWW using collaborative virtual environments. In: Howard, S., Hammond, J., Lindgaard, G. (eds.) Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT ’97. ITIFIP, pp. 539–546. Springer, Boston (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35175-9_81CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 5.Benford, S., Snowdon, D., Greenhalgh, C., Ingram, R., Knox, I., Brown, C.: VR-VIBE: a virtual environment for cooperative information retrieval. Comput. Graph. Forum 14(3), 349–360 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 6.Bonnel, N., Cotarmanac’h, A., Morin, A.: Meaning metaphor for visualizing search results. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information Visualization, pp. 467–472 (2005)Google Scholar
- 7.Bowman, D.A., Hodges, L.F., Bolter, J.: The virtual venue: user-computer interaction in information-rich virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators Virtual Environ. 7(5), 478–493 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 8.Bowman, D., Kruijff, E., LaViola Jr., J.J., Poupyrev, I.P.: 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2004)Google Scholar
- 9.Card, S.K., Robertson, G.G., Mackinlay, J.D.: The information visualizer, an information workspace. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 181–188 (1991)Google Scholar
- 10.Chiu, P., Girgensohn, A., Lertsithichai, S., Polak, W., Shipman, F.: MediaMetro: browsing multimedia document collections with a 3D city metaphor. In: Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 213–214 (2005)Google Scholar
- 11.Cibelli, M., Costagliola, G., Polese, G., Tortora, G.: A virtual reality environment for Web browsing. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, pp. 1009–1014 (1999)Google Scholar
- 12.Feiner, S., MacIntyre, B., Hollerer, T., Webster, A.: A touring machine: prototyping 3D mobile augmented reality systems for exploring the urban environment. In: Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Wearable Computers, pp. 74–81 (1997)Google Scholar
- 13.Gracanin, D., Wright, K.E.: Virtual reality interface for the World Wide Web. In: Proceedings of the 15th Twente Workshop on Language Technology: Interactions in Virtual Worlds, pp. 59–68 (1999)Google Scholar
- 14.Jankowski, J.: A taskonomy of 3D web use. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D 2011), pp. 93–100 (2011)Google Scholar
- 15.Huang, J., White, R.W.: Parallel browsing behavior on the web. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT 2010), pp. 13–18 (2010)Google Scholar
- 16.Huang, J., Lin, T., White, R.W.: No search result left behind: branching behavior with browser tabs. In: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2012), pp. 203–212 (2012)Google Scholar
- 17.JauntVR (n.d.). https://www.jauntvr.com/. Accessed 22 Jan 2018
- 18.Jhaveri, N., Räihä, K.-J.: The advantages of a cross-session web workspace. In: CHI 2005 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2005), pp. 1949–1952 (2005)Google Scholar
- 19.Morris, D., Morris, M.R., Venolia, G.: SearchBar: a search-centric web history for task resumption and information re-finding. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2008, pp. 1207–1216 (2008)Google Scholar
- 20.Nakaoka, M., Tezuka, T., Tanaka, K.: WebDriving: Web browsing based on a driving metaphor for improved children’s e-Learning. In: Bressan, S., Küng, J., Wagner, R. (eds.) DEXA 2006. LNCS, vol. 4080, pp. 499–508. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11827405_49CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 21.Robertson, G., Czerwinski, M., Larson, K., Robbins, D.C., Thiel, D., van Dantzic, M.: Data mountain: using spatial memory for document management. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 1998), pp. 153–162 (1998)Google Scholar
- 22.Sparacino, F., Wren, C., Azarbayejani, A., Pentland, A.: Browsing 3-D spaces with 3-D vision: body-driven navigation through the Internet city. In: Proceedings of the First International Symposium on 3D Data Processing Visualization and Transmission, pp. 224–231 (2002)Google Scholar
- 23.Card, S.K., Robertson, G.G., York, W.: The WebBook and the Web Forager: video use scenarios for a World-Wide Web information workspace. In: Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 1996), pp. 416–417 (1996)Google Scholar
- 24.Thatcher, A.: Web search strategies: the influence of web experience and task type. Inf. Process. Manag. 44(3), 1308–1329 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 25.Xu, W., Yu, C., Zhao, S., Liu, J., Shi, Y.: Facilitating parallel web browsing through multiple-page view. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), pp. 2167–2170 (2013)Google Scholar