Abstract
Presentation of content is an important aspect of today’s virtual reality applications, especially in domains such as virtual museums. The large amount and variety of exhibits in such applications raise a need for adaptation and personalization of the environment. This paper presents a content personalization platform for Virtual Museums, which is based on a semantic description of content and on information implicitly collected about the users through their interactions with the museum. The proposed platform uses stereotypes to initialize user models, adapts user profiles dynamically and clusters users into similar interest groups. A science fiction museum has been set up as a case study for this platform and an evaluation has been carried out.








Similar content being viewed by others
References
Benyon D, Höök K (1997) Navigation in information spaces: supporting the individual. In: Howard S, Hammond J, Lindegaard G (eds) Human-computer interaction: INTERACT’97, pp 39–46
Burke R (2002) Hybrid recommender systems: survey and experiments. User Model User-adapt Interact 12:331–370. doi:10.1023/A:1021240730564
Celentano A, Pittarello F (2004) Observing and adapting user behavior in navigational 3D interfaces. Proc. of AVI 2004, pp 275–282
Chittaro L, Ranon R (2002) Dynamic generation of personalized VRML content: a general approach and its application to 3D E-commerce, Proc. of the seventh international conference on 3D Web technology, pp 145–154
Chittaro L, Ranon R, Ieronutti L (2003) Guiding visitors of Web3D Worlds through automatically generated tours, Proc. of Web3D 2003: 8th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, pp 27–38
Ciabatti E, Cicnoni P, Montani C et al (1998) Towards a distributed 3D virtual museum. Proc. of Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, pp 264–266
Corbit M (2002) Building virtual worlds for informal science learning (SciCentr and SciFair) in the Active Worlds Educational Universe (AWEDU). Presence 11(1):55–67. doi:10.1162/105474602317343659
Darken RP, Sibert JL (1993) A toolset for navigation in virtual environments. In Proc. of UIST’93, pp 157–165
dos Santos C, Osorio F (2004) An intelligent and adaptive virtual environment and its application in distance learning. Proc. of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, pp 362–365
Economou D (2004) Virtual reality and museums: the development of a collaborative virtual environment for learning about ancient Egypt. Museology—International Scientific Electronic Journal 14(2)
Eirinaki M, Vazirgiannis M (2003) Web mining for web personalization. ACM Trans Internet Technol 3(1):1–27. doi:10.1145/643477.643478
Fink J, Kobsa A (2000) A review and analysis of commercial user modeling servers for personalization on the world wide web. User Model User-adapt Interact 10:209–249. doi:10.1023/A:1026597308943
Itzkovich I, Hawkes LW (1994) Fuzzy extension of inheritance hierarchies. Fuzzy Sets Syst 62:143–153. doi:10.1016/0165-0114(94)90054-X
Kang H, Yang H (2004) The effect of anonymity on the usage of avatar: comparison of internet relay chat and instant messenger. Proc. of the Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, pp 2734–2743
Kim W, Kerschberg L, Scime A (2002) Learning for automatic personalization in a semantic taxonomy-based meta-search agent. Electron Commerce Res Appl 1:150–173. doi:10.1016/S1567-4223(02)00011-X
Kim YS, Kesavadas T, Paley S (2006) The virtual site museum: a multi-purpose, authoritative, and functional virtual heritage resource. Presence 15(3):245–261. doi:10.1162/pres.15.3.245
Ko D, Sumi Y, Choi Y et al (1999) Personalized Virtual Exhibition Tour (PVET): an experiment for Internet collaboration. Proc Syst Man Cybern IEEE SMC 99:25–29
Kobsa A, Koenemann J, Pohl W (2001) Personalized hypermedia presentation techniques for improving online customer relationships. Knowl Eng Rev 16(2):111–155. doi:10.1017/S0269888901000108
Lepouras G, Vassilakis C (2004) Virtual museums for all: employing game technology for edutainment. Virtual Real 8(2):96–106. doi:10.1007/s10055-004-0141-1
Lepouras G, Charitos D, Vassilakis C et al (2001) Building a VR-museum in a museum. Proc. of VRIC Virtual Reality International Conference
MacQueen JB (1967) Some methods of classification and analysis of multivariate observations, Proc. of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, pp 281–297
Minsky M (1975) A framework for representing knowledge. The Psychology of Computer Vision. McGraw-Hill, New York, pp 211–277
Mobasher B, Cooley R, Srivastava J (2000) Automatic personalization based on web usage mining. Commun ACM 43(8):142–151. doi:10.1145/345124.345169
Modjeska D, Waterworth J (2000) Effects of desktop 3D world design on user navigation and search performance, Proc. of IEEE Information Visualization, pp 215–220
Mukherjee R, Sajja E, Sen S (2003) A movie recommendation system—an application of voting theory in user modeling. User Model User-adapt Interact 13(1–2):5–33. doi:10.1023/A:1024022819690
Nowak KL, Rauh C (2005) The influence of the avatar on online perceptions of anthropomorphism, androgyny, credibility, homophily, and attraction. J Comput Mediat Commun 11(1):153–178. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.tb00308.x
Patel M, White M, Walczak K et al (2003) Digitization to presentation—Building virtual museum exhibitions. Proc. of Vision Video and Graphics, pp 1–8
Perugini S, Goncalves MA, Fox EA (2004) Recommender systems research: a connection-centric survey. J Intell Inf Syst 23(2):107–143. doi:10.1023/B:JIIS.0000039532.05533.99
Petridis P, White M, Mourkousis N et al (2005). Exploring and interacting with virtual museums, Proc. Of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA)
Raskutti B, Beitz A, Ward B (1997) A feature-based approach to recommending selections based on past preferences. User Model User-adapt Interact 7:179–218. doi:10.1023/A:1008291330418
Rich E (1979) User modeling via stereotypes. Cogn Sci 3:329–354
Rongen PHH, Schroder J, Dignum FPM et al (2005) Multi agent approach to interest profiling of users. Proc. of Multi-Agen Systems and Applications IV, pp 326–355
Schaerf M, Tessicini A (1999) JubilEasy: build a personalized 3D visit of Rome. In Proc. of VRML 99—Fourth Symposium on the VRML, pp 105–112
Schafer JB, Konstan JA, Riedl J (2001) E-commerce recommendation applications. Data Min Knowl Discov 5:115–153. doi:10.1023/A:1009804230409
Su CJ, Yen B, Zhang X (1998) An internet based virtual exhibition system: conceptual design and infrastructure. Comp Ind Eng 35(3–4):615–618
Tsichritzis D, Gibbs S (1991) Virtual museums and virtual realities. Proc. of International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, pp 17–25
Urban R, Marty P, Twidale M (2007) A second life for your museum: 3D multi-user virtual environments and museums. In: Trant J, Bearman D (eds) Proc. of Museums and the Web 2007
Vinson NG (1999) Design guidelines for landmarks to support navigation in virtual environments. Proc CHI 99:278–285
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bonis, B., Stamos, J., Vosinakis, S. et al. A platform for virtual museums with personalized content. Multimed Tools Appl 42, 139–159 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-008-0231-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-008-0231-2