Collaborative Visual Data Exploration with Guidance on Large Displays

Problem

Large displays are highly beneficial for visual data analysis, providing ample screen space to present complex data with greater detail and better organization. Their size allows for more options compared to smaller displays, enhancing user interactions by enabling collaborative analysis and supporting multiple perspectives or views simultaneously.

However, designing visualizations for large displays introduces additional challenges. It requires careful consideration of interaction techniques for navigating the larger canvas and managing collaboration between multiple users, ensuring each has the support needed to carry out their analysis effectively.

Aim

The aim of this student project is to design and implement a visual interactive interface for data analysis and exploration on a large display.

In particular, the focus is the design and implementation of guidance mechanisms [6] to be visualized on the periphery of the user's vision to suggest/recommend further actions or to steer the analysis. The idea is to use the concept of scented widgets [1] to visualize this additional information to support the user's navigation. Examples of information that could be visualized are 1) showing what other persons are doing, 2) showing predefined stories or analysis paths (e.g., for storytelling or for contextual awareness), and 3) contributing to a shared collaborative task.

This project is specifically meant for project students (PR) or students who want to do their Master's thesis on the topic of visualization (MA). The topic could be also initially started as PR and then continued as MA (with the appropriate extensions and modifications due to the increased workload necessary for thesis work).
This project is pursued in collaboration with the University of Newcastle (Daniel Archambault and Alma Cantu)
and with the TU Wien Bibliotech that will provide the necessary equipment (i.e., the large display -- Touchwall).

For more information on the display:

https://www.tuwien.at/en/library/digital-scholarship/data-visualisation-space-davis


 

Other information

References:

  1. Willett, Wesley, Jeffrey Heer, and Maneesh Agrawala. "Scented widgets: Improving navigation cues with embedded visualizations." IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 13.6 (2007): 1129-1136.
  2. Belkacem, Ilyasse, et al. "Interactive Visualization on Large High‐Resolution Displays: A Survey." Computer Graphics Forum. 2022.
  3. Horak, Tom, et al. "Demonstrating David Meets Goliath: Combining Smartwatches with a Large Vertical Display for Visual Data Exploration." Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2018.
  4. Kister, Ulrike, et al. "GraSp: Combining Spatially‐aware Mobile Devices and a Display Wall for Graph Visualization and Interaction." Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 36. No. 3. 2017.
  5. Chokshi, Apoorve, et al. "ePlan multi-surface: A multi-surface environment for emergency response planning exercises." Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces. 2014.
  6. Ceneda, Davide, et al. "Characterizing guidance in visual analytics." IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 23.1 (2016): 111-120.

Contact

Further information

Topics
Large Display Visualization
Collaborative Visual Data Analysis
Guidance
Area
Information Visualization (IV)
Visual Analytics (VA)
English
Scope
PR
MA
Assigned as
Master thesis/Diplomarbeit
Status
open