Enriching the browsing experience

Abstract

Despite the many advances that web browsers have gone through over the years, they retain more or less the same approach that was employed during the 90s. Since then, the WWW has grown to staggering proportions, which calls for new methods to both analyze and organize the mounds of data on the Internet. This paper explores the feasibility of using visualization techniques from Virtual Reality to make the WWW easier to navigate. Instead of having a flat, tabbed view as is common with most web browsers, web pages are rendered to planes in a 3D environment. A website can be split into visual components called blocks , and moved around in the 3D environment or removed altogether. An arrangement of components can then be saved in a 'layout' for future use. These layouts shall also be publicly distributable. We believe that this approach can lead to a community-driven browsing experience as well as provide implicit feedback to developers in order to improve the 'default layout' of their websites.