Geospatial Access to Lifelogging Photos in Virtual Reality

Abstract

We present a virtual reality system for accessing geotagged photos taken with a lifelogging camera. Photos are spatially located on a world map that can be explored with a head-mounted display. Using a virtual reality headset allows users to easily and intuitively explore this large information space. Images are initially represented by icons but become visible once a user gets closer to a particular area of interest. While not suitable for all search tasks, this visualisation has benefits in situations where location plays a significant role; be it because the actual content is location-related or because the owner of the lifelog remembers and associates the related event with certain places. Likewise, our spatial representation of the data often implicitly reveals a temporal relationship, which can be helpful in the search process as well. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Virtual reality; Human computer interaction (HCI); Visualization systems and tools; • Applied computing → Education;

Exploring Intuitive Lifelog Retrieval and Interaction Modes in Virtual Reality with vitrivr-VR

“…In strong contrast to VRLE, the lifelog exploration system described in [17] forgoes most conventional query modes and user interface elements, providing only a VR map to explore the lifelog data through their associated geospatial information. Although this results in an intuitive way to explore the spatial aspects of the lifelog data in a way not possible using conventional user interfaces, the restriction to one aspect of the data severely limits the system's ability to take advantage of much of the information provided in lifelog search tasks, such as temporal and visual semantic information.…”

Information retrieval interfaces in virtual reality—A scoping review focused on current generation technology

“…However, while not indicated by exploratory queries conducted before this review, there might still be some works that don't use the term at all but are relevant nonetheless. Some works ( [50] and [51]) feature a system that fits the requirement of an Information Retrieval system as they use an abstract query, the user's interaction with a world map, to represent results (images geotagged to the location). However, the system interaction is described as browsing in these works (but the authors also included the term search prominently).…”

Voxento: A Prototype Voice-controlled Interactive Search Engine for Lifelogs

“…In this work, the authors used virtual reality as a way to visualise lifelog data and perform search tasks based on a temporal filter and concepts selection. In other research [15], the authors presented a new feature with virtual reality where users can see photographs located on a world map based on geographic data using a head-mounted display. However, large volumes of data explored in a limited screen size make visualisation difficult and detecting a relevant item could take a long time.…”