Investigating the Possibility of Adaptation and Personalization in Virtual Environments

Abstract

The complex nature of virtual environments customarily hinders users to interact in a natural, intuitive and optimal way. Different user characteristics are hardly taken into account when designing 3D user interfaces for virtual environments. We envision that user interaction in virtual environments can be enhanced by integrating adaptation and personalization into 3D user interfaces. Through our research, we aim to provide adaptive and personalized 3D user interfaces for enhancing user interaction in virtual environments. The establishment of a user model becomes an important first step to facilitate adaptation and personalization to the user. In order to partly construct the user model, we carried out an experiment on 3D target acquisition task with four user groups (differing in experience level and gender). In this paper, we present a general user model that will enable first-time users to benefit instantly from adaptation and personalization in virtual environments.