Figure 13

Screenshot of StarWalker interface. StarWalker interface (previously available from http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~cssrccc2/vrml2/starwalker/. The linked stars are icons representing papers from three years conference proceedings (1995–1997) of ACM CHI (Association for Computing Machinery – Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction). When the user clicks one of these icons, the full text version of the corresponding paper appears in the right frame. Links between spheres indicate that the corresponding papers have salient semantic connections as derived through a Generalised Similarity Analysis modelling procedure, which is used to build the semantic space that is then rendered into a Virtual Reality (VR) model in VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language). Vertical bars in red are some papers concerning social interaction and discourse structures in the context of Human-Computer Interaction. Users can move around within this VRML-based virtual world, e.g., walk, fly, etc. StarWalker does not tell the user what resource a star is pointing to until the star is actually clicked and the resource loaded (a major shortcoming). Also, there is no map legend, but the developers of StarWalker mention that articles (stars) are colour-coded by the year of publication [19].