Download a paper on Q-SPACE in Acrobat format

Pettifer S, Cook J, Mariani J, "Towards Real-Time Interactive Visualisation in Virtual Environments: A Case Study of Q-SPACE", to appear in proc. International Conference on Virtual Reality 2001, Laval, France 17th - 18th May 2001

Virtual Environments present opportunities for novel interaction with and visualization of abstract data. However, the inherent difficulties of rendering three dimensional environments, as well as bottlenecks in traditional virtual reality systems make real-time manipulation of realistic volumes of data difficult. The aim of the Q-SPACE work was to explore appropriate technologies, techniques and architectures to address these issues.

The Q-SPACE system takes unstructured query data from on-line sources and applies a series of algorithms resulting in clusters of data grouped according to user-defined criteria which are positioned in a three dimensional space.

Users can navigate in real time around this three dimensional space to explore the relationships between the data items and clusters. Information on selected data items is displayed in the GUI. Users leave behind a trial which charts their movement from data item to data item to act as a navigation aid.

New queries can be issued and the relevance weightings defining the relationships between the groups can be altered in real-time resulting in the dynamic restructuring of the space. The semantics of the user trial are preserved as the spatial layout is restructured.

The MAVERIK system was used to implement the visualization and interaction aspects of Q-SPACE. MAVERIK allows for the tight integration of the visualized objects with underlying placement algorithm. An approach which avoids transmitting the object's position between the placement engine an a separate visualization system is essential in this highly dynamic environment.

On current (April 01) hardware real-time visualization and interaction is possible with up to 2000 data objects.