Deformable maps and spaces: visualizing users' points of interest and user communication

Web-based virtual space, which is often represented as a 2D or 3D space, is useful for people wanting to connect, collaborate and communicate through the Internet. Moreover, attractive functions can be optionally added to a virtual space to enhance user interactions and activities. We focus on such a function, spatial deformation, which is applied for the dual purpose of preserving and visualizing each user's points of interest in a virtual world. The spatial deformation concept can be adapted to many types of virtual world; for example, 2D/3D worlds or image-based/object-based worlds. We discuss the basic algorithms that can be used with this function and preliminary experiments done using our prototype system.