Integrating Data Visualization and the Physical World

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My team's research will examine new opportunities for situating data visualization in the physical world via systems that allow people to collect, visualize, and interact with data in-context to inform everyday decision making. Data-driven thinking and analysis tools are increasingly ubiquitous. Yet in most domains, visualization and analysis still happen on the desktop, far from the real-world spaces, systems, and problems they aim to address. In application areas like personal health, workplace optimization, and urban design, this indirection between desktop systems and the real-world nature of work can make it hard to capitalize on data and analysis. This limits the potential for data to inform decision making and reduces the extent to which viewers can link environmental context to data-driven insights. Fortunately, emerging technologies like ubiquitous low-power displays, dynamic projection mapping systems, and mixed reality headsets have the potential to change this dynamic-surfacing data directly in the environments where it is most relevant. My research team will harness these new display technologies to create new situated data visualization systems that help end-users incorporate data into their own unique environments and workflows. We will focus on three core themes: Theme 1 - Designing new situated data visualizations that integrate with physical environments. My team will create new situated visualization designs for ubiquitous displays, projection mapping systems, and mixed reality headsets, addressing issues with occlusion, data density, spatio-temporal indirection, and other known challenges which make it difficult to re-use existing desktop visualization techniques. Theme 2 - Exploring new interaction techniques for accessing and exploring situated visualizations. My team will design and test new interaction techniques that leverage the connections between visualizations and real-world objects and spaces-allowing viewers to control visualizations by navigating and interacting with the real-world locations and objects. Theme 3 - Examining new authoring paradigms for creating and customizing situated visualizations. My team will design, develop, and test new interfaces that allow end-users to design visualizations tailored to their unique environments. In particular, we will focus on approaches that allow end-users to link datasets and visualizations to physical environments to quickly create representations that help solve specific real-world problems. The results of the proposed research will help unlock the potential for data visualizations in real-world spaces, leading to new in-situ analysis approaches that could improve decision-making in a variety of industries. Both the technical and empirical outcomes of the proposed work have the potential to drive technology innovation in Canada over the next 5-10 years, creating new opportunities for start-ups and other tech investment related to situated visualization tools.