Mind Mapping in VR - Generating Mind Maps from Textual Information for Interaction in a Virtual Reality Environment

Sep 10, 2026

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In today’s fast-paced technological world, people are continually exposed to an overwhelming amount of information, creating demand for visual, summarized interpretations. Mind Mapping provides a graphically organized reflective view, and virtual reality enhances clarity through a three-dimensional interface with three degrees of freedom. This work presents an end-to-end pipeline that generates mind maps from textual information using OpenAI large language models with tailored prompts and data processing. The pipeline includes a developed web application and a VR environment for display and interaction. Two experiment series—anatomy for medical students and news summarization—show positive user experience, though model communication caused a high error rate, suggesting selective value across use cases.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages64

Reading Time22 min

AccessFree to download

1 Introduction

1.1 Contributions

2 Background

2.1 OpenAI GPT Model

2.2 Force-Directed Graphs and Coordinate Generation

2.3 Virtual Reality: Display and Interaction

3 Related Work

3.1 Generation of Mind Maps from Textual information

3.2 Mind Map Visualization and Interaction in Virtual Reality

4 Implementation

4.1 Developed Pipeline Overview

4.2 Web App Front End

4.3 Web App API

4.4 Mind Map Import and Interaction in Noda.io

5 Pipeline Testing, Results and Discussion

5.1 Testing Environment

5.2 First Testing Case: Anatomy

5.3 Second Testing Case: News

Mind Mapping in VR: Generating Mind Maps from Textual Information for Interaction in a Virtual Reality Environment Afonso Maria de Muller e Sousa Castelo Thesis to obtain the Master of Science Degree in Computer Science and Engineering Supervisors: Prof. Daniel Simes Lopes Prof. Mrio Jorge Costa Gaspar da Silva Examination Committee Chairperson: Prof. Pedro Tiago Gon˜ c¸alves Monteiro Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Simoes Lopes Member of the Committee: Prof. Augusto Emanuel Abreu Esteves November 2023 Declaration I declare that this document is an original work of my own authorship and that it fulfills all the requirements of the Code of Conduct and Good Practices of the Universidade de Lisboa. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my family for always supporting me when I needed encouragement or was feeling down. To my friend of heart, Manuel, for always being there for me and pulling me back up when I needed it. To the rest of my closest friends, for reminding me that I should take time and relax instead of always working/studying. To Tame Impala, Aphex Twin, Frank Ocean, Metronomy, Daniel Caesar and several other bands and artists who helped me stay lucid, aware, energized and happy through their music throughout my college experience. To my supervisors, Prof. Daniel and Prof. Mrio for their help on this work. Last but not least, to all those that helped make me who I am today-happy, confident and passionate about life’s challenges that never stop coming by. Abstract In today’s fast-paced technological world, people are continually exposed to an overwhelming amount of information. A need for a visual, summarized interpretation of data becomes more valuable and sought after. Mind Mapping, a visual reflective task can tackle this issue by summarizing information into a graphically organized view. Moreover, combined with virtual reality, a three-dimensional display with three degrees of freedom allows for its visualization to be clearer. In this work, a full pipeline for generating mind maps based on textual information is introduced. By utilizing OpenAI’s large language models, combining the right prompts and data processing, a mind map generation process has been achieved. Moreover, this pipeline includes a developed web application and involves the integration of a virtual reality environment for the display and interaction of the given generated mind maps. From two series of experiments conducted, one for the building of mind maps from anatomy texts to aid medical students and another to summarize news, it was observed that the pipeline’s user experience is positive but that the way we communicated with the intelligent model raised a high error rate. Moreover, this application should be more valuable in some use cases than others. This exploratory work presents a novel pipeline for generating, observing and interacting with mind maps. Keywords Mind Mapping; Virtual Reality; Natural Language Processing; Force-Directed Graphs; Web Development Resumo No mundo tecnolgico actual, as pessoas esto continuamente expostas a uma quantidade avassaladora de informac¸ o. A necessidade de uma interpretac¸ o visual e resumida dos dados torna-se entomais valiosa e procurada. O Mind Mapping, uma tarefa de reflexo visual, pode resolver este problemaao resumir a informac¸ o numa estrutura grfica organizada. Para alm disso, quando combinado coma realidade virtual, os trs graus de liberdade permitem que a sua visualizac¸ o seja mais clara. Nestetrabalho, apresentado uma pipeline completa para gerar mind maps com base em texto. Atravs da utilizac¸ o de grandes modelos de linguagem da OpenAI, usando as instruc¸ es correctas e processamento de dados, foi criado um processo de gerac¸ o de mind maps. Este processo inclui uma aplicac¸ o Web desenvolvida e envolve a integrac¸ o de um ambiente de realidade virtual para a visualizac¸ o e interac¸ o dos mind maps gerados. A partir de duas experincias realizadas, uma pa

FAQs

What problem does the work address and how does VR help?

It addresses the challenge of interpreting overwhelming amounts of information by providing visually summarized mind maps. VR improves clarity by presenting the visualization in three dimensions with three degrees of freedom.

How are mind maps generated from text in the proposed pipeline?

The pipeline uses OpenAI large language models with appropriate prompts plus data processing to transform textual input into a mind map representation.

What components support interaction and where is the mind map displayed?

A developed web application supports user workflows, and a virtual reality environment is integrated to display the generated mind maps and enable interaction with them.

Sep 10, 2026

Upload by Aladdin