Augmenting user interfaces for digital libraries with virtual reality

The paper describes a generic approach to the development of a virtual reality based user interface for a collection of digital documents. We emphasise the role of intrinsic inter document relationships in structuring and visualising a digital library. We integrate techniques from information retrieval and structure modelling for visualising the ACM Hypertext Compendium. Salient relationships in the Compendium are extracted and visualised as associative networks. A virtual reality based user interface is automatically generated in VRML. We show that the spatial layout of the virtual world highlights prominent structural patterns in the Compendium. We discuss design issues concerning seamlessly browsing the digital library in a 3D virtual world and how users can search and browse within a consistent spatial metaphor provided by the user interface.