Mapping visualization on-demand onto a virtual globe: an appealing complement to browser-based navigation

Abstract

Current browser-based navigation is a universal and powerful tool, but lacks of three useful features: overview of the global website structure, efficient history browsing and an alternative to link-link navigation. By combining Visualization on-demand (Vizod) with an interactive virtual globe, we tackled these issues by means of multi-resolutions maps displayed according to user's interactions and preferences. We provided in this way a contextual hypertext navigation, each page being assigned locations and links on top a a virtual map. We built up and performed experiments of a prototype providing a smooth, appealing and promising complement to browser-based navigation.