mentegrafica | infovis solutions

Well try to offer more contents during the upcoming April

Last time we were talking about Collaborative Infovis Spaces with Petra and so, we decided to have a better understanding of her work, so lets start reading her answers to our questions.

1 - When, how and why have you decided to research on infovis ?
I implemented my first InfoVis application in my second year as an undergrad when I became a research assistant for a bioinformatics research group at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. I visualized information about how people accessed one of the group’s databases to reveal patterns in this data. In Magdeburg I was enrolled in Computational Visualistics, which is a degree program in which students learn ways to solve picture-related problems using digital methods and electronic tools. This covers many research areas like computer graphics, computer vision, human-computer interaction (HCI), or information visualization (InfoVis). When I enrolled, I did not know that information visualization would be the area I would find most fascinating. This first InfoVis project as a research assistant, however, showed me how interesting it is to find ways to visualize and show patterns in data. Then, as part of my degree program, I spent a 5-month internship with my current InfoVis research group at the University of Calgary, Canada. I conducted my first real “research” project there, on detail-and-context visualizations.

2 - Where the project come from ? What have been your inspirations ?
In my lab we do a lot of research on large, multi-touch tabletop and wall displays. Often, this research is fundamentally about how people use these displays and about how they interact with each other or with artifacts on the displays while solving tasks. Much of my PhD research inspiration comes from looking at this previous research and thinking about if and how it can be applied and extended to people working on information visualization tasks

3 - How long it takes to reach the prototype phase from the beginning of the project ?
Lets take my current research project, even though it is not yet finished. I began coding my first prototype about one year ago. In parallel, I did an extensive literature review on what people have published about collaborative work on shared displays and related it to the specific problem I am working on, collaboration with information visualizations on large shared displays. I also ran a study in which I observed groups working on information visualizations tasks in the physical world (to be published at CHI 2008).
I am currently building a second iteration of the first prototype that will incorporate new types of visualizations and interaction techniques. I expect to finish and evaluate this prototype by the end of August.

4 - Did u need to write a propetary operating system ? Which are the technologies behind your projects?
I did not have to write my own operating system. All our displays in the lab are powered by PCs running WindowsXP. What makes my program different, however, is that it does make use of any operating system-specific widgets or graphical user interface elements. For example, I don’t use Windows buttons, sliders, etc. They are all individually designed to work for large, multi-touch displays.

5 - From almost 2 years, some interesting new projects (like Many Eyes) are focusing on collaborative infovis.
What do you expect to be the evolution of collaborative infovis in next monthes ?
I think there will be two main research streams: collaborative information visualization across distance and in shared workspaces. Projects like Many Eyes focus on supporting collaborative information visualization across distance. For this type work, applications will be built or extended to help viewers to distribute, share, and discuss datasets from any computer connected to the Internet. In my research I am focusing on the second direction. I want to support collaborative data analysis for people working together in the same room on a shared large display. For example, think about doctors examining medical data together, researchers analyzing experiment results in their lab, or business analysts discussing the latest sales trends using a shared large display in a meeting room in which the data can be interactively changed, re-drawn, and updated. Traditionally, information visualization tools have been designed to support one user. Research on collaborative information visualization for shared workspaces will have to think about ways in which visualizations and interaction techniques may need to be changed or extended to support multiple people in their data analysis. Since the research on both types of collaborative information visualization is still relatively new, I expect to see quite a number of new systems and ideas emerge in the near future.

6 - How do your project interact with the net ?
I mean…how people could share an information space, even they are not in the same physical space ?
In my project I am currently using a large, multi-touch tabletop display built by Smart Technologies, a Calgary company. I developed a collaborative environment in which hierarchical data can be explored and compared by several people working together around this tabletop displays. They can use several features that have been designed to facilitate collaborative work practices: people can interact, create, and use copies of the same visualization to explore information together or in parallel. Visualizations can be personalized, for example, by choosing different colour scales, display sizes, or types of representation. Lastly, visualizations also can be freely moved around the workspace to accommodate people standing in different locations around the tabletop display, and to form categorizations and organizations of the data. My system currently cannot be used across the internet. It has been designed for people to work together in the same room using a shared display to encourage shared face-to-face interaction, discussion, arguments, and negotiation about the information.