Geo-spatial hypertext in virtual reality: mapping and navigating global news event spaces

Every day, a myriad of events take place that are documented and shared online through news articles from a variety of sources. As a result, as users navigate the Web, the volume of data can lead to information overload, making it difficult to find specific details about an event. We present News in Time and Space (NiTS) to address this issue: NiTS is a fully immersive system integrated into Va.Si.Li-Lab that organises textual information in a geospatial hypertext system in virtual reality. With NiTS, users can visualise, filter and interact with information currently based on GDELT on a virtual globe providing document networks to analyse global events and trends. The article describes NiTS, its event semantics and architecture. It evaluates NiTS in comparison to a classic search engine website, extended by NiTS's information filtering capabilities to make it comparable. Our comparison with this website technology, which is directly linked to the user's usage habits, shows that NiTS enables comparable information exploration even if the users have little or no experience with VR. That is, we observe an equivalent search result behaviour, but with the advantage that VR allows users to get their results with a higher level of usability without distracting them from their tasks. Through its integration with Va.Si.Li-Lab, a simulation-based learning environment, NiTS can be used in simulations of learning processes aimed at studying critical online reasoning, where Va.Si.Li-Lab guarantees that this can be done in relation to individual or groups of learners.