EUROGRAPHICS '95 / Frits Post and Martin Göbel (Guest Editors), Blackwell Publishers © Eurographics Association, 1995 Volume 14, (1995), Number 3 VR-VIBE: A Virtual Environment for Co-operative Information Retrieval Steve Benford, Dave Snowdon, Chris Greenhalgh , Rob Ingram, Ian Knox and Chris Brown Department of Computer Science, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK Abstract We present a virtual reality application called VR-VIBE which is intended to support the co-operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR-VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR-VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co-operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR-VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting. Keywords: VR, CSCW, information visualization, multi-user, DIVE, browsing 1. Introduction The aim of our work is to support co-operative information retrieval in virtual environments; that is, enabling users to browse three dimensional representations of document stores and to be aware of and communicate. with others who are doing the same. We anticipate that the results of this work could eventually be applied in several areas including library information systems and Network Information Retrieval systems such as the World Wide Web. From a virtual reality perspective, our work adds to the growing body of research into visualisation. This includes other approaches to document visualisation [1], scientific visualisation (see [2]), database and filestore visualisation [3, 4, 5, 6] and network visualisation [7]. The techniques we propose are targeted at understanding the results of applying multiple search queries to collections of mainly textual documents. Our work also adds to the growing body of research into collaborative virtual environments [8,9,10]. In particular, we aim to complement existing work on virtual meeting rooms and multi-user simulations by providing a more abstract environment directly created from shared information as opposed to a simulation of the real world. From an information retrieval perspective, we aim to overcome some of the problems inherent in text