IMMERSIVE MOVEMENT-BASED INTERACTION WITH LARGE COMPLEX INFORMATION STRUCTURES

An intuitive, immersive, movement-based interface and system provides for navigating through large collections of multidimensional information. The interface allows users to navigate through large document collections by maintaining a constant density of visual information presented on a display device to the user at any given moment of time. The document collection is organized in an immersive information space, containing various levels of topics and related documents. At each level within the immersive information space contextual information is presented to the user. The contextual information consists of a semantic scale and a pathway to the information they are viewing. An information structure represents the immersive information space of documents. The information structure consists of a collection of documents, and a graph of topics that describe the relationships between the documents. The graph of topics consists of topic nodes that each contain 1) a set of documents that are about that topic, and 2) a set of links to other topics in the structure. The links represent relationships between topics, and indirectly, relationships between the documents. An information structure that represents the collection of documents is used to guide the user to documents of interest and to show relationships between documents. A presentation and interaction model allows navigation through the information structure. The model includes a camera representing a user's focus of attention, and a set of reactable graphical objects representing nodes in the information structure. The interaction model continuously monitors the movement of the camera in relation to the graphical objects and updates the display of the information space.