Visualization and Analysis of Visiting Styles in 3D Virtual Museums

1
Visualization and Analysis
of Visiting Styles in 3D
Virtual Museums
Sookhanaphibarn, Kingkarn
kingkarn@ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp
Intelligent Computer Entertainment
Laboratory Global COE Program in Digital
Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures
Ritsumeikan University
Thawonmas, Ruck
ruck@ci.ritsumei.ac.jp
Intelligent Computer Entertainment
Laboratory Global COE Program in Digital
Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures
Ritsumeikan University
A virtual museum is a cyberspace in persistent
virtual worlds, such as Second Life, for
displaying digitalized heritage documents.
Urban et. al. (2007) reported that over 150
sites in Second Life (SL) were developed
for education and museum activities. Virtual
museums in SL offer visitors opportunities to
engage in opening art exhibitions, discuss with
specialists, and enjoy exploring collections of the
wide range of artifacts. Those artifacts displayed
in the virtual museums vary from 3D documents
of the world heritages to fictional creations
(Rothfarb, R. and Doherty, P., 2007).
This paper aims at visualization and analysis
of visitor behaviors in 3D virtual museums.
Without loss of generality, we focused on a
museum in Second Life, named Ritsumeikan
Digital Archive Pavilion (RDAP) as shown in
Figures 1-2. The museum was used in this paper
for developing a prototype of our visualization
and analysis tool. Efficient visualization of the
user movement is very useful for analyzing his/
her behaviors, in an implicit manner, in order to
extract the disclosed information of individuals
in the cyberspace.
Applications of the proposed visualization
method include the following:
1.
The curators can design the exhibit space
based on the majority of visitors as illustrated
in Section 3.
2.
The storytelling of an individual visitor can
be expressed as a sequence of screenshots
capturing the most favored exhibits (as
described in Fujita, H. et al., 2008).
3.
A guide system can be applied so as to achieve
a satisfactory museum tour as introduced by
Sookhanaphibarn and Thawonmas.
Figure 1. Kimono exhibition in Ritsumeikan
Digital Archive Pavilion (RDAP)
Figure 2. Floor plan of RDAP with the locations of
19 Kimono objects denoted by a small solid square
1. Visualization and analysis of
visiting patterns
To validate our visualization approach, 36
avatars’ movements in RDAP were synthesized
for obtaining four visiting styles. These styles,
based on the metaphor of animal behavior,
are ant, fish, grasshopper, and butterfly styles
as follows (Veron, E. & Levasseur, M., 1983;
Chittaro, L., 2004):

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