Human knowledge acquisition from 3D interaction in virtual environments

Recently, virtual environment (VE) based design and planning, which is a kind of interaction intensive computing, has shown great potential. Most users of such systems are specialists or technicians and their 3D interactions with the system embed a great deal of knowledge and skills. Thus, how to integrate human knowledge and skills into VE is a great challenge to researchers in the human computer interaction field. This paper proposes a method for acquiring user knowledge from VE. The main ideas and work include, abstracting the interactive process and formalizing the interactive semantics, as well as providing a semantic model of an interactive information repository, from which user interactive processes can be retrieved and all kinds of application logics can be established. A virtual assembly planning system is introduced as an example of a practical application of this method. Experiments show that the related models can well capture user knowledge and retrieve the interaction process.