This paper provided empirical knowledge of the user experience for using collaborative visualization in a distributed asymmetrical setting through controlled user studies. With the ability to access various computing devices, such as Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays, scenarios emerge when collaborators have to or prefer to use different computing environments in different places. However, we still lack an understanding of using VR in an asymmetric setting for collaborative visualization. To get an initial understanding and better inform the designs for asymmetric systems, we first conducted a formative study with 12 pairs of participants. All participants collaborated in asymmetric (PC-VR) and symmetric settings (PC-PC and VR-VR). We then improved our asymmetric design based on the key findings and observations from the first study. Another ten pairs of participants collaborated with enhanced PC-VR and PC-PC conditions in a follow-up study. We found that a well-designed asymmetric collaboration system could be as effective as a symmetric system. Surprisingly, participants using PC perceived less mental demand and effort in the asymmetric setting (PC-VR) compared to the symmetric setting (PC-PC). We provided fine-grained discussions about the trade-offs between different collaboration settings.
CATVis: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Workflow for Turbomachinery Simulation Data Visualization
Beijing China 2 Computer Network Information Center Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study UCAS Hangzhou China（杭州高等研究院（UCAS））；Michigan Technological University Houghton MI USA（密歇根理工大学）
The increasing prevalence of Virtual Reality technologies as a platform for gaming and video playback warrants research into how to best apply the current state of the art to challenges in data visualization. Many current VR systems are noncollaborative, while data analysis and visualization is often a multi-person process. Our goal in this paper is to address the technical and user experience challenges that arise when creating VR environments for collaborative data visualization. We focus on the integration of multiple tracking systems and the new interaction paradigms that this integration …
The Thinking Wave is an ongoing development of visualization concepts showing the real-time effort and confidence of semi-autonomous vehicle (AV) systems. Offering drivers access to this information can inform their decision making, and enable them to handle the situation accordingly and takeover when necessary. Two different visualizations have been designed, Concept one, Tidal, demonstrates the AV systems effort through intensified activity of a simple graphic which fluctuates in speed and frequency. Concept two, Tandem, displays the effort of the AV system as well as the handling dynamic an…
Understanding different types of users' needs can even be more critical in today's data visualization field, as exploratory visualizations for novice users are becoming more widespread with an increasing amount of data sources. The complexity of data-driven projects requires input from including interdisciplinary expert and novice users. Our workshop framework helps taking design decisions collaboratively with experts and novice users, on different levels such as outlining users and goals, identifying tasks, structuring data, and creating data visualization ideas. We conducted workshops for tw…
Distributed systems technologies supporting 3D visualization and social collaboration will be increasing in frequency and type over time. An emerging type of head-mounted display referred to as the head-mounted projection display (HMPD) was recently developed that only requires ultralight optics (i.e., less than 8 g per eye) that enables immersive multiuser, mobile augmented reality 3D visualization, as well as remote 3D collaborations. In this paper a review of the development of lightweight HMPD technology is provided, together with insight into what makes this technology timely and so uniqu…
Conducting collaborative tasks, e.g., multi-user game, in virtual reality (VR) could enable us to explore more immersive and effective experience. However, for current VR systems, users cannot communicate properly with each other via their gaze points, and this would interfere with users' mutual understanding of the intention. In this study, we aimed to find the optimal eye tracking data visualization , which minimized the cognitive interference and improved the understanding of the visual attention and intention between users. We designed three different eye tracking data visualizations: gaze…
Effective data visualization is a key part of the discovery process in the era of big data. It is the bridge between the quantitative content of the data and human intuition, and thus an essential component of the scientific path from data into knowledge and understanding. Visualization is also essential in the data mining process, directing the choice of the applicable algorithms, and in helping to identify and remove bad data from the analysis. However, a high complexity or a high dimensionality of modern data sets represents a critical obstacle. How do we visualize interesting structures an…
This paper uses the collaborative project Radical Translations as case study to examine some of the theoretical perspectives informing the adoption and critique of data visualization in the digital humanities with applied examples in context. It showcases how data visualization is used within a King's Digital Lab project lifecycle to facilitate collaborative data exploration within the project interdisciplinary team - to support data curation and cleaning and/or to guide the design process - as well as data analysis by users external to the team. Theoretical issues around bridging the gap betw…
Establishing common ground and maintaining shared awareness amongst participants is a key challenge in collaborative visualization. For real-time collaboration, existing work has primarily focused on synchronizing constituent visualizations - an approach that makes it difficult for users to work independently, or selectively attend to their collaborators' activity. To address this gap, we introduce a design space for representing synchronous multi-user collaboration in visualizations defined by two orthogonal axes: situatedness, or whether collaborators' interactions are overlaid on or shown o…
Collaborative data consist of ratings relating two distinct sets of objects: users and items. Much of the work with such data focuses on filtering: predicting unknown ratings for pairs of users and items. In this paper we focus on the problem of visualizing the information. Given all of the ratings, our task is to embed all of the users and items as points in the same Euclidean space. We would like to place users near items that they have rated (or would rate) high, and far away from those they would give a low rating. We pose this problem as a real-valued non-linear Bayesian network and emplo…
This paper describes a system to support the visual exploration of Open Data. During his/her interactive experience with the graphics, the user can easily store the current complete state of the visualization application (called a viewpoint). Next, he/she can compose sequences of these viewpoints (called scenarios) that can easily be reloaded. This feature allows to keep traces of a former exploration process, which can be useful in single user (to support investigation carried out in multiple sessions) as well as in collaborative setting (to share points of interest identified in the data set…
A growing number of efforts aim to understand what people see when using a visualization. These efforts provide scientific grounding to complement design intuitions, leading to more effective visualization practice. However, published visualization research currently reflects a limited set of available methods for understanding how people process visualized data. Alternative methods from vision science offer a rich suite of tools for understanding visualizations, but no curated collection of these methods exists in either perception or visualization research. We introduce a design space of exp…
General visualization recommendation systems typically make design decisions for the dataset automatically. However, most of them can only prune meaningless visualizations but fail to recommend targeted results. This paper contributes TaskVis, a task-oriented visualization recommendation system that allows users to select their tasks precisely on the interface. We first summarize a task base with 18 classical analytic tasks by a survey both in academia and industry. On this basis, we maintain a rule base, which extends empirical wisdom with our targeted modeling of the analytic tasks. Then, ou…
The use of head-mounted display technologies for virtual reality experiences is inherently single-user-centred, allowing for the visual immersion of its user in the computer-generated environment. This isolates them from their physical surroundings, effectively preventing external visual information cues, such as the pointing and referral to an artifact by another user. However, such input is important and desired in collaborative scenarios when exploring and analyzing data in virtual environments together with a peer. In this article, we investigate different designs for making spatio-tempora…
Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机辅助设计与图形学国家重点实验室）；VIS/VISUS, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学可视化与交互系统研究所）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Storyline visualizations are an effective means to present the evolution of plots and reveal the scenic interactions among characters. However, the design of storyline visualizations is a difficult task as users need to balance between aesthetic goals and narrative constraints. Despite that the optimization-based methods have been improved significantly in terms of producing aesthetic and legible layouts, the existing (semi-) automatic methods are still limited regarding 1) efficient exploration of the storyline design space and 2) flexible customization of storyline layouts. In this work, we …
Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS). All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneou…
