In the digitized World, information is entangled in a mesh of unstructured web. Finding and retrieving relevant web resources to suit the user's information requirement is a challenge. Moreover, understanding and adapting to cater to different user information requirements is also an uphill task. To achieve the desired outcome, it is needed to have user accepted technology. Therefore, web information retrieval systems, especially search engines, should be user centered.Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) provides a basis with which one traces how external variables influence belief, attitude, and intention to use. Two cognitive beliefs are posited by TAM; perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. This empirical study explores the influence of Users and Environment characteristics on a modern web information retrieval system. This paper analyzes the variables to determine perceptions of usefulness, attitude and preferences leading towards frequent factors to influence typical TAM results.

The Web is used increasingly for informal learning which is more conversation based and learner-centred. Many intrinsic and extrinsic factors contribute towards retrieving information on demand. However, Web information retrieval (IR) has proved to be a challenging task due to the rapid increase in quantities of digitised information. Thus, retrieval time and learner attention should receive more emphasis to make Web IR more effective. This study identifies and tests an extended version of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to identify the role of environment factors in effective Web resource usage. The study shows that the presence of environment factors lowers perceived access barriers, leading to more effective usage. Furthermore, the results suggest that extending the TAM to include perceived access barriers helps to explain the existence and application of intrinsic motivation factors leading to effective usage, providing key insights for website designers to re-evaluate their processes to incorporate environment factors.

Virtual Reality (VR) or Virtual Environments (VE) has become a hot topic in modern research. Virtual reality is defined as the description of a three dimensional computer generated environment where a human can interact and explore. This research paper explains the design and the development of a virtual reality application named "Porawalokanaya", modeled "Polonnaruwa", an ancient city in Sri Lanka. It is important to look for ways where technology can be used to preserve prestigious heritage of a county. Porawalokanaya aimed to build realistic 3D models capturing the miniature detail of ancient Sri Lankan architecture and merged into an Android based virtual reality application. The users of the application will be able to experience visiting the city as they do in the real world. The application comprise of narration and a mini-map. Along with the 3D models of the important ancient buildings, the application has modeled the natural environment to give more realistic feeling to the user. The models were created using Autodesk Maya 2016 and Autodesk Mudbox 2016. The application was built in Unity Platform with C# scripts.

Today managing files in a server system has the same magnitude as managing the World Wide Web due to the dynamic nature of the file system. Even searching for files over the file system is time consuming because finding a file on hard disk is a long-running task. Every file on the disk has to be read with dangling pointers to files which no longer exist because they have been changed, moved or deleted. This makes the user frustrated. The Automatic file indexing framework facilitates users to resolve file names and locate documents stored in file repositories. The main design objective of the framework is to maintain sub-indexes at the folder level that have the full knowledge of the revisions that are made at the folder level automatically. This research proposes a framework that manages the creation and maintenance of the file index, with the use of Resources Description Framework (RDF) and retrieval using semantic query languages i.e. SPARQL. The sub-indexes are maintained hierarchically starting from the leaf node to the root node recursively. The proposed framework will monitor the file system continuously and update individual folder descriptors (sub-indexes) stored on each node as the file system changes making the cached indexes resilient to any file changes. The framework is resilient of file or folder name changes. Further, the study explores avenues to build an offline semantic index that can be used by the clients to perform distribute file search without performing the search on the server itself. This is viable since the framework uses semantic languages to describe and build file descriptors that can easily integrate semantic indexing and hence this makes the index readily available for the Web.