3D Virtual Environment Navigation Aid Techniques for Novice Users Using Topic Map

3D virtual environment provides a limited amount of information, mainly focusing on visual information. This is the main cause of users losing the sense of direction in the environment. Many researches for developing a navigation tools that address this problem have been carried out. In this study, a navigation tool is designed by applying topic map, one of the technologies for semantic web construction, to a 3D virtual environment. Topic map constructs a semantic link map by defining the connection relation between topics. According to an experiment done to evaluate the proposed navigation tool, the tool was more helpful in finding detailed object than highly represented objects. Also, it could be seen that providing the surrounding knowledge is effective for object selection by users when that target for searching is not defined. key words: guided navigation, topic map tour guide, virtual environment