Immersive Search: Interactive Information Retrieval in Three-Dimensional Space

Researchers in interactive information retrieval (IIR) have studied and refined 2D presentations of search results for years. Recent advances are bringing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to real-world systems, though the IIR community has done relatively little work to explore and understand aspects of 3D presentations of search results, effects of immersive environments, and the impacts of spatial cognition and different spatial arrangements of results displays in 3D. In the research proposed here, I outline my plan to use immerse environments to investigate how users' spatial cognition may influence the information retrieval process. Specifically, this work will observe how spatial arrangements of search results affect users' ability to find information in the post-query, visual search phase of the IIR process across quantitative and qualitative measures.