On the Design of a Dual-Mode User Interface for Accessing 3D Content on the World Wide Web

International audienceThe World Wide Web, today's largest and most important online information infrastructure, does not support 3D content and, although various approaches have been proposed, there is still no clear design methodology for user interfaces that tightly integrate hypertext and interactive 3D graphics. This paper presents a novel strategy for accessing information spaces, where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and interlinked. We introduce a Dual-Mode User Interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime: the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions "hypertext mode", where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive "3D mode", which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. A user study is presented, which characterizes the interface in terms of its efficiency and usability

Audio-visual perception of new wind parks

Previous studies have reported negative impacts of wind parks on the public. These studies considered the noise levels or visual levels separately but not audio-visual interactive factors. This study investigated the audio-visual impact of a new wind park using virtual technology that combined audio and visual features of the environment. Participants were immersed through Google Cardboard in an actual landscape without wind parks (ante operam) and in the same landscape with wind parks (post operam). During the virtual exposure, the reactions of the participants to visual and noise impacts of the wind park were assessed using affective, cognitive, and subjective measures. Participants exhibited significant increases in aural annoyance post operam relative to ante operam. The same result was found in levels of visual annoyance. Aural annoyance and visual annoyance were significantly correlated. However, no direct effects of wind turbines on affective and cognitive measures were found, suggesting wind parks may not have obviously effects on people's objective disturbance. The perceived annoyance was associated with people's attitudes toward the wind parks, but not the sounds of the wind parks. These findings further our understanding of the objective and subjective effects of wind parks on human performance, and allow designers to make scientific decisions during the initial stage of a wind park planning

Enhancing the use of online 3d multimedia content through the analysis of user interactions

De plus en plus de contenus 3D interactifs sont disponibles sur la toile. Visualiser et manipuler ces contenus 3D en temps réel, de façon naturelle et intuitive, devient donc une nécessité. Les applications visées sont nombreuses : le e-commerce, l'éducation et la formation en ligne, la conception, ou l'architecture dans le contexte par exemple de musées virtuels ou de communautés virtuelles. L'utilisation de contenus 3D en ligne ne propose pas de remplacer les contenus traditionnels, tels que les textes, les images ou les vidéos, mais plutôt d'utiliser la 3D en complément, pour enrichir ces contenus. La toile est désormais une plate-forme où les contenus hypertexte, hypermédia, et 3D sont simultanément disponibles pour les utilisateurs. Cette utilisation des contenus 3D pose cependant deux questions principales. Tout d'abord, les interactions 3D sont souvent lourdes puisqu'elles comprennent de nombreux degrés de liberté; la navigation dans les contenus 3D peut s'en trouver inefficace et lente. Nous abordons ce problème en proposant un nouveau paradigme basé sur l'analyse des interactions (crowdsourcing). En analysant les interactions d'utilisateurs 3D, nous identifions des régions d'intérêt (ROI), et générons des recommandations pour les utilisateurs suivants. Ces recommandations permettent à la fois de réduire le temps d'interaction pour identifier une ROI d'un objet 3D et également de simplifier les interactions 3D nécessaires. De plus, les scènes ou objets 3D contiennent une information visuelle riche. Les sites Web traditionnels contiennent, eux, principalement des informations descriptives (textuelles) ainsi que des hyperliens pour permettre la navigation. Des sites contenants d'une part de l'information textuelle, et d'autre part de l'information 3D peuvent s'avérer difficile à appréhender pour les utilisateurs. Pour permettre une navigation cohérente entre les informations 3D et textuelles, nous proposons d'utiliser le crowdsourcing pour la construction d'associations sémantiques entre le texte et la visualisation en 3D. Les liens produits sont proposés aux utilisateurs suivants pour naviguer facilement vers un point de vue d'un objet 3D associé à un contenu textuel. Nous évaluons ces deux méthodes par des études expérimentales. Les évaluations montrent que les recommandations réduisent le temps d'interaction 3D. En outre, les utilisateurs apprécient l'association sémantique proposée, c'est-à-dire, une majorité d'utilisateurs indique que les recommandations ont été utiles pour eux, et préfèrent la navigation en 3D proposée qui consiste à utiliser les liens sémantiques ainsi que la souris par rapport à des interactions utilisant seulement la souris. ABSTRACT : Recent years have seen the development of interactive 3D graphics on the Web. The ability to visualize and manipulate 3D content in real time seems to be the next evolution of the Web for a wide number of application areas such as e-commerce, education and training, architecture design, virtual museums and virtual communities. The use of online 3D graphics in these application domains does not mean to substitute traditional web content of texts, images and videos, but rather acts as a complement for it. The Web is now a platform where hypertext, hypermedia, and 3D graphics are simultaneously available to users. This use of online 3D graphics, however, poses two main issues. First, since 3D interactions are cumbersome as they provide numerous degrees of freedom, 3D browsing may be inefficient. We tackle this problem by proposing a new paradigm based on crowdsourcing to ease online 3D interactions, that consists of analyzing 3D user interactions to identify Regions of Interest (ROIs), and generating recommendations to subsequent users. The recommendations both reduce 3D browsing time and simplify 3D interactions. Second, 3D graphics contain purely rich visual information of the concepts. On the other hand, traditional websites mainly contain descriptive information (text) with hyperlinks as navigation means. The problem is that viewing and interacting with the websites that use two very different mediums (hypertext and 3D graphics) may be complicated for users. To address this issue, we propose to use crowdsourcing for building semantic associations between texts and 3D visualizations. The produced links are suggested to upcoming users so that they can readily locate 3D visualization associated with a textual content. We evaluate the proposed methods with experimental user studies. The evaluations show that the recommendations reduce 3D interaction time. Moreover, the results from the user study showed that our proposed semantic association is appreciated by users, that is, a majority of users assess that recommendations were helpful for them, and browsing 3D objects using both mouse interactions and the proposed links is preferred compared to having only mouse interactions