III: EAGER: Mapping Three-Dimensional Virtual Worlds

III：EAGER：绘制三维虚拟世界

• 批准号: 1050801
• 负责人: Susan Gauch
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: University of Arkansas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1050801&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: III; EAGER; Mapping; Three; Dimensional

Navigating in online virtual worlds is similar to searching the Web prior to the development of the first search engine. Users can find regions of interest to them through serendipity, by browsing or word of mouth, but they can only search the specific world they are on. This exploratory project investigates an enabling mobile crawler technology that can collect information across multiple worlds, and allows virtual worlds to grow in a distributed, multi-server, multi-platform manner. Of particular interest is content in 3D environments that is interconnected with the traditional flat Web. In this research explores strategies for gathering content from 3D environments and, using that content, gain a better understanding of how users are utilizing 3D environments and how they might benefit from more accessible, cross-platform search services. Crawling in 3D environments has many similarities with flat Web crawling but has additional constraints that may constrain how much content can reasonably be collected. The gathered data will further be explored, e.g., how frequently content changes in 3D environments and how users utilize linking in virtual worlds as compared to the linkage structures on the Web. In addition, this project investigates how traffic patterns in 3D environments are related to links, recommendations, and groups. The research challenges in this project are: (1) Gathering content from distributed 3D environments. This includes approaches for navigating around the 3D environment for information collection are explored, mapping the 3D environment space, analysis of the impact of additional information that can only be collected via interaction, and characterization of the additional information that is available through internal and external links.(2) Gaining a better understanding of user behavior. Research focuses on investigating ways in which user linkage patterns are similar to, and different from, user linkages on the flat Web and whether or not avatar traffic can be used to identify sites of broader user interest that can be exploited by the search process.(3) Supporting search across multiple platforms. The aim is to develop a 3D 3D object ontologies and a schema, similar to RSS, that will enable virtual world servers to more easily support sharing of their data with an external search service.As 3D environments become both more prevalent and more diverse, the need for a cross-platform search service will continue to grow. By increasing the visibility of content across platforms and servers, this project will allow content creators to focus on creating higher quality 3D environment by providing effective search mechanism for finding the desired content in a large, distributed, virtual world.The expected results are expected to provide foundations for exploring questions of how to discover and rank a wide range of content in virtual reality, mirror world, and augmented reality environments. By creating an open platform, this project will provide opportunities for more researchers to work in 3D environments. The database of regions, traffic, and linkages will be made available for downloading and analysis by other researchers. Research results, gathered data and the crawler will be made available as freeware via the project Web site (http://virtualworldsearch.uark.edu).

在在线虚拟世界中导航类似于在开发第一个搜索引擎之前搜索Web。用户可以通过偶然发现、浏览或口口相传找到他们感兴趣的区域，但他们只能搜索他们所在的特定世界。这个探索性项目研究了一种启用移动爬虫技术，该技术可以跨多个世界收集信息，并允许虚拟世界以分布式、多服务器、多平台的方式增长。特别令人感兴趣的是与传统平面网络互连的3D环境中的内容。在这项研究中，探索了从3D环境中收集内容的策略，并通过使用这些内容，更好地了解用户如何利用3D环境，以及他们可能如何从更易访问的跨平台搜索服务中受益。3D环境中的爬行与平面Web爬行有许多相似之处，但有其他限制，这些限制可能会限制合理收集多少内容。将进一步探索所收集的数据，例如，3D环境中的内容改变的频率以及与网络上的链接结构相比，用户如何利用虚拟世界中的链接。此外，该项目还调查了3D环境中的流量模式与链接、推荐和组之间的关系。本项目的研究挑战是：(1)从分布式3D环境中收集内容。这包括探索在3D环境中导航以进行信息收集的方法、映射3D环境空间、分析只能通过交互收集的附加信息的影响、以及表征可通过内部和外部链接获得的附加信息。(2)更好地理解用户行为。研究的重点是调查用户链接模式与平面网络上的用户链接相似和不同的方式，以及化身流量是否可以用来识别搜索过程可以利用的更广泛用户兴趣的站点。(3)支持跨平台搜索。其目的是开发类似于RSS的3D对象本体和模式，使虚拟世界服务器能够更容易地支持与外部搜索服务共享其数据。随着3D环境变得更加普遍和多样化，对跨平台搜索服务的需求将继续增长。通过提高跨平台和服务器的内容可见性，该项目将允许内容创建者通过提供有效的搜索机制来在大型、分布式、虚拟世界中查找所需内容，从而专注于创建更高质量的3D环境。预期结果将为探索如何在虚拟现实、镜像世界和增强现实环境中发现和排名各种内容提供基础。通过创建一个开放的平台，该项目将为更多的研究人员提供在3D环境中工作的机会。区域、流量和链接的数据库将提供给其他研究人员下载和分析。研究结果、收集的数据和爬虫程序将通过项目网站(http://virtualworldsearch.uark.edu).)免费提供