Browsing Internet Content in Multiple Dimensions Vision of a Web Browsing Tool for Immersive Virtual Reality Environments Tiger Cross Riccardo Bovo Thomas Heinis Imperial College London Imperial College London Imperial College London
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT organising information across more than one axis, compared to An immersive virtual reality environment (IVRE) offers a design the vertical navigation of desktop browsers. space radically different from traditional desktop environments. Our vision aims to implement a web browser application Within this new design space, it is possible to reimagine a con- that uses an existing search API to perform a search engine’s tent search experience which breaks away from the linearity of work. User’s search tactics in information retrieval systems (i.e., current web browsers and the underlying single relevance metric browsers) have been categorized by previous literature into two of the search engine. distinct categories: goal-directed searching behaviour and ex- To the best of our knowledge, there is no current commercial ploratory search behaviour[2]. We note that there is not a clear nor research implementation that allows users to interact with re- line that can be drawn between the two. Users that exhibit sults from a web search ordered in more than one dimension[11]. Goal-directed searching behaviour, whom we will refer to as On the research front, a lot of work has been done in ordering "Searchers", know what they are looking for and wish to find query results based on semantic relations and different types of it quickly and easily (e.g.