The 3D Wunderkammer: an indexing by placing approach to the image storage and retrieval

The explosion of storage media size and spread of the Internet have resulted in a huge amount of images and multimedia material that an average user has to deal with. The traditional use of filenames and directories is no longer sufficient. In contrast to keywording and a kind of content-based image retrieval, we introduce a novel approach to storing and retrieving images, and other multimedia material using an indexing by placing mechanism. The idea is to let the user place images in the 3D environment, where the user can easily find them again. The images can be collected, modified, and grouped together. The principles described in the paper are implemented in the 3D Wunderkammer system, a multi-user client-server application. The server is completely written in Java and the client runs in a standard Web browser with a standard VRML plug-in.