Patent ID: 8805813

Claim:
A method, in a data processing system, for facilitating object search in a virtual world environment including a plurality of objects, each object being defined by a plurality of attributes, the method comprising: selecting, via user input, a set of first object attributes on which to perform the search; defining for each first object attribute a desired value or a range of desired values; performing the search selecting a set of objects according to the user input thereby forming selected object; determining a relevance factor by performing a similarity comparison between the set of first object attributes and the plurality of attributes of each of the selected objects; and presenting the selected objects in a scaled down three-dimensional visual representation, scaled by a scale factor, showing the user's position and a location for the selected objects within the virtual world, wherein the selected objects are shown using x y, and z coordinates from the user's position, wherein the scale factor of the scaled down three-dimensional visual representation is based on a distance between the user's position and a farthest object of the selected objects, and wherein the scale factor is adjusted over a plurality of queries so that each scaled down three-dimensional visual representation utilizes a largest scale factor from the plurality of queries.