• HiVE UI / Copernicus
• ELITE

This project was the foundation for my PhD Thesis. It has been funded in part by Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland. It aims to provide an interdisciplinary view on hypertext and interactive 3D graphics and to develop a usable and effective 3D Web user interface design, where hypertext and 3D graphics are simultaneously available and linked.

Aim of the Project

Hypertext and interactive 3D graphics, two fundamental types of resources that are at odds on the Web. We believe that people can gain a lot from using integrated information spaces where hypertext and 3D graphics are simultaneously available and linked – spaces that we call Hypertextualized Virtual Environments (HiVEs).

Hypertext		3D Graphics
The cube (here in blue) is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object (here in green). Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface laying the same distance from the center point. This distance is known as the radius of the sphere. The maximum straight distance through the sphere is known as the diameter of the sphere. A pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting a polygonal base and a point, called the apex. Each base edge and apex form a triangle.	+

Figure 1: How to design a user interface that combines hypertext and 3D graphics?

Viewing and interacting with HiVEs can be complicated: users need to simultaneously deal with hypertext and three-dimensional graphics, two very different mediums that should both be appreciated equally. Users need to be able to browse the text - look through the general information and search for more specific information. They also need to navigate freely through a three-dimensional space, and examine and manipulate virtual 3D objects, to gain a better understanding of the data. An interface for the exploration of this kind of integrated information spaces must provide adequate controls for the user to support all these tasks. How to design a user interface for HiVEs?

Dual-Mode User Interface (DMUI) Design

Designing such user interface presents some interesting challenges; in particular, we need to combine interactive 3D graphics know-how with well established user interface conventions of the Web.

Hypertext Mode		3D Mode
The cube (here in blue) is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object (here in green). Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface laying the same distance from the center point. This distance is known as the radius of the sphere. The maximum straight distance through the sphere is known as the diameter of the sphere. A pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting a polygonal base and a point, called the apex. Each base edge and apex form a triangle.	OR

Figure 2: The two modes of the proposed Dual-Mode User Interface.

The central hypothesis of this work is that for the user interface for HiVEs to be both effective and usable, it should have two modes between which the user can switch anytime to suit his/her need or preference:

• Hypertext "don't-make-me-think" Mode - In this mode textual information and 3D scenes coexist side by side within a 2D hypertext environment. Here, hyperlinks constitute not only a mechanism for navigation between hypertext documents, but also for navigation within 3D scenes – this mode provides users with the ability to view 3D content from different points of view with a single mouse click.
• 3D "take-me-to-the-Wonderland" Mode - This mode immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. Compared with the hypertext mode, it was designed to make users feel more present in the virtual environment - more immersed. The 3D mode provides users with much more freedom with regards to the 3D tasks – it was designed to support unconstrained interactive browsing and navigation through a 3D scene.

Copernicus

Besides the theoretical framework, we also needed practical tools to carry out our research. We developed Copernicus, a wiki-type authoring environment allowing the rapid development of HiVEs, a testbed allowing for the experimentation and for the assessment of both hypertext and 3D modes of the Dual-Mode user interface.

Future Work

The work on HiVEs opens a new field, and as such leads to many new questions. We have identified several key areas for future research:

• Firstly, our theory is not yet grounded in any formal standard, as we have focused is on the HCI perspective of the problem. In future we want to explore the possibilities of applying our Dual-Mode UI design paradigm in the HTML5 specification, since it does not yet define how the integration of 3D imagery into XHTML actually should look like.
• Another future avenue that we intend to explore is collaborative web browsing. Currently, browsing the Web is mostly an individual experience. People visiting the same web page at the same time are not aware of each other. DMUI supporta this personal nature of browsing. On the other hand, research on Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) has shown that their entertainment and social nature can provide virtual communities with richer content and greater interactivity and greatly support collaborative work. We envision HiVEs evolving into shared virtual spaces in which people, while being in the 3D mode of the DMUI, can interact and communicate with each other through their avatars (graphical representations of themselves).

Acknowledgments

The work on HiVE/Copernicus has been funded in part by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/08/CE/I1380 and by Enterprise Ireland under Grant No. PC/2008/353.