Navigation by Query in Virtual Worlds
Van Ballegooij and Eliëns present a new navigation technique in 3D virtual
environments by querying its contents. The user can navigate through the 3D
world by asking questions like "Can I see the north face of the building",
or "Where is the City hall" in case of urban models.
The author developed a working prototype in VRML and Java using the EAI interface.
However, the VRML world they used for testing was annotated and used special
viewpoints to be able to give a reasonable answer to the user query. Basically,
the system is scanning through the VRML file to find words match with the query
and displays the viewpoint associated with those keywords.
A similar interface could be applied to Redliner or Space Pen for query
on the content of a comment mark. If a match is found with the text content
of the comment, the browser can take the user directly to the viewpoint associated
with the matching comment. This can be done without editing the VRML model.
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