High-level visualization of users' navigation in virtual environments

Abstract

This paper presents the current status of VU-Flow (Visualization of Users' Flow), a software tool that is able to automatically record usage data in Virtual Environments and provide a set of 2D and 3D visualizations that make it easy for an evaluator to visually detect peculiar users' behaviors and navigability problems. The paper focuses on novel functionalities we recently added to the tool. More specifically, the new version of VU-Flow includes: (i) the possibility of visualizing predominant flow directions for multiple users or multiple visiting sessions, (ii) a visualization aimed at highlighting traffic congestion problems in multi-user VEs, (iii) the possibility of visualizing a replay of users' visits together with audio and video recordings of actual users (e.g. gathered during lab experiments), and (iv) the ability to derive, for each user, a list of quantitative data characterizing her behavior in the VE. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.