Enhancing Semantic and Social Navigation in Information-Rich Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds are a popular medium for communication and collaboration in 3D and they are being utilized as shared information spaces in various application areas, such as education, culture and entertainment. Being presented as 3D visualization spaces they adopt a spatial model of navigation, in which information artifacts have a certain position in space and users can access them through their avatar. However, compared to traditional hypermedia and web-based information systems, Virtual Worlds offer little support for discovering semantically related artifacts and for following the preferences and actions of other users. Furthermore, there is a lack of interoperability with other information systems that would enhance the world’s objects with semantically related content. In this paper we present a framework for extending virtual worlds with interactions and visualizations that support improved semantic and social browsing in the 3D environment, and propose an integrated architecture for their interface with external information sources through the employment of Linked Data. Following the proposed framework, we have implemented a prototype environment that presents a gallery of famous paintings and we have performed a user evaluation in order to assess its usability, focusing especially on its novel features for semantic and social browsing.