Expressive Multimedia Query Formulation for Novices in Virtual Reality with vitrivr-VR

With the rapidly increasing amount of multimedia content encountered in every day life, interactive multimedia retrieval continues to rise in importance. While a lot of progress has been made in making interactive multimedia retrieval accessible even to novice users using conventional desktop interfaces, novel interface technologies, such as immersive interfaces, have not received enough attention. With the rise in popularity and the increasing affordability of mixed and virtual reality (VR) devices, new methods to enable interactive multimedia retrieval, especially for novice users, are needed. In this paper, we describe a version of the vitrivr-VR virtual reality multimedia retrieval system enhanced to increase usability by novices. By providing simple and intuitive interactions and interfaces with the most common functionality prominently accessible, and more advanced functionality available for those who want to use it, we expect to be able to provide an effective and enjoyable search experience for novice users and experts alike. Specifically, we simplify the search interface to a single search bar, provide convenient and intuitive VR text input methods, and support simple and familiar results browsing interfaces ideal for novice users.