I've been thinking about ideas for an HCI project and have a few ideas for my own project (more on that in another post). I have been sitting and had another (I think great) idea for a full on HCI project.
My idea is given in bullet points below:
- Your site is parsed and a tree is made up of the site
- A 3D map is made up of your site (with rooms representing pages and corridors representing links)
- All the information given on each page is put somewhere in each room
- A quake/doom/... style character is spawned and you can start 'browsing' the site starting from the index
- Highly linked pages are easy to find whereas lowly linked pages will have less corridors leading to them and thus are harder to find
- Information on the pages, stored in the corresponding room, can be used to allow access to other rooms
This allows the user to have a real walk through their site, looking at the information on each page. Perhaps links in the content can direct the user down a corridor or will open the door to that corridor allowing them to travel to the linked page.
Goals could be to browse the whole site or to find a very remote page, perhaps battling HTML/XHTML/PHP/Javascript errors as monsters or solving puzzles to access parts of the site, a community of sites could build up different maps which when linked would allow a user to jump from one site to another and start exploring that.
A very basic idea, but it would be fun to see if anyone could (or would ever bother) to do it.
- Chris