A Simple 3D Visual Text Retrieval Interface
Ben Houston, Zack Jacobson · 2002
3D visual text retrieval interfaces are currently a fringe topic of interest. This paper suggests that 3D visual interfaces are fringe topics because of the complexity and abstract nature of many of the previous attempts in this area. In order for 3D visual interfaces to become mainstream this paper proposes that they must be concrete in the metaphor they employ, simple to use, and appear familiar to the average web user. In a set of two prototypes, AutoViz and NetViz, an attempt is made to fulfill these requirements. The prototypes represent the query terms one plane and the documents in a second parallel plane. A spring system is used to cluster the terms and documents into a meaningful structure. Document profiles are displayed to the user as they move the mouse on top of document representations. Keywords: information visualization, visual query languages, search interfaces, information retrieval. 1 Introduction Very little work has been done on 3D visual search interfaces in th...