Remembrance of things past: Using maps and routes to navigate through virtual environment experiences

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) show great promise in domains such as education. Instead of using 3D space to weakly imitate physical classrooms, educators can create 3D spaces that directly reflect subject matter, and allow students to interact with it. Using non-physical 3D spaces creates potential orientation and navigation problems, which are best solved by means of (a) familiar metaphors and (b) repeated, gradually expanding experiences within the virtual space. This paper explores the use of maps and routes to navigate not the 3D virtual environment, but the records of users' previous experiences in the environment. Our premise is that textual content (whether lecture or lab material, or chat transcripts) can be more effectively navigated using appropriate temporal and subject-oriented aids, instead of relying on scrollbars or textual searches. We are exploring these concepts within the context of Unicron, a collaborative virtual environment for education.