resources2city Explorer: A System for Generating Interactive Walkable Virtual Cities out of File Systems

Abstract

We present resources2city Explorer (R2CE), a tool for representing file systems as interactive, walkable virtual cities. R2CE visualizes file systems based on concepts of spatial, 3D information processing. For this purpose, it extends the range of functions of conventional file browsers considerably. Visual elements in a city generated by R2CE represent (relations of) objects of the underlying file system. The paper describes the functional spectrum of R2CE and illustrates it by visualizing a sample of 940 files.