How to Establish a Connection to Virtual Reality within Geo-Social Networks?

Wide use of smartphones and location-based services has created a new concept of social media named Geo-Social Networks (GSNs). These networks are utilizing GPS and Web ۲.۰ technologies together to allow users to share their location, to find local attractive points, to opine on special locations, to establish relation with or find their friends which are near them. The number of users of these networks are increasing every year. The fast development of GSNs has caused to have access to a vast amount of users’ data including trajectories and their social relations. These data provide opportunity for researchers to analyze movement behaviors of users in terms of spatial, temporal and social, using data mining techniques. Geo-social networks through providing location based services allow users to check their profiles in different locations and as a result, their location will be registered automatically in database as Check-ins. In the other hand, virtual reality (VR) which is the use of computer technology to create simulated environments has been widely used in different fields. The term virtual activity refers to activities in which the user enters into a non-real environment thanks to the advancement of technology and there he/she attempts to do what he/she used to do in the real world. Virtual reality places the user inside a three-dimensional experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are immersed in and interact with ۳D worlds. This paper aims to redesign the four-layered conceptual model of the geo-social networks so to include another layer named virtual activity layer. Afterwards based on this new designed architecture, a new recommender system will be developed as virtual activity recommender system (VARS) that suggests virtual activities such as v-lerning, v-shopping, v-meeting and etc. to the target users based on the similarity measurement between the users.

کلیدواژه ها:

Geo-Social Networks ، Data Mining ، Virtual Reality ، Recommender Systems ، Check-In