Using Semantic Annotations for Customizing Navigation Paths and Virtual Tour Guides for Virtual Environments

Nowadays more Virtual Environment (VEs) are becoming available on the web. This means that VE are becoming more accessible to a larger and more diverse audience. It also means that the interpretation of VEs and their virtual objects (i.e. how to interact with the virtual environment and the meanings of the associated virtual objects) are more likely to differ from one group of persons to another group of persons. In order for a VE to be a success on the Web, end-users should easily get familiar with the VE and understand the meanings of its virtual objects. Otherwise, the end-user may be more tempted to quit the VE. Therefore, the process of annotation and the creation of navigation paths for virtual tour guides are important to ease the use of VEs. Most of the time, this is done by VR-experts and the annotations are very poor and often only text based. This paper describes an approach and associated tool that allows a layman to add or update annotations to existing virtual environments. In our approach, annotations are not limited to text but may also be multimedia, i.e. images, videos, sounds. Furthermore, the approach (and the tool) also allows creation of navigation paths and tour guides.