User interaction for visual lifelog retrieval in a virtual environment

Efficient retrieval of lifelog information is an ongoing area of research due to the multifaceted nature, and ever increasing size of lifelog datasets. Previous studies have examined lifelog exploration on conventional hardware platforms, but in this paper we describe a novel approach to lifelog retrieval using virtual reality. The focus of this research is to identify what aspects of lifelog retrieval can be effectively translated from a conventional to a virtual environment and if it provides any benefit to the user. The most widely available lifelog datasets for research are primarily image-based and focus on continuous capture from a first-person perspective. These large image corpora are often enhanced by image processing techniques and various other metadata. Despite the rapidly maturing nature of virtual reality as a platform, there has been very little investigation into user interaction within the context of lifelogging. The experiment outlined in this work seeks to evaluate four different virtual reality user interaction approaches to lifelog retrieval. The prototype system used in this experiment also competed at the Lifelog Search Challenge at ACM ICMR 2018 where it ranked first place