Artistic collaboration in designing VR visualizations

Abstract

T his article describes some of the lessons we have learned from our collaborations with artists on visualization problems at Brown University's Visualization Research Lab. Over the past several years, we have worked closely with artists to develop, refine, and critique visualizations ranging from archaeological dig data from the Great Temple of Petra site in Jordan to the fluid dynamics and wing bone shape deformations that begin to explain how bats, the only flying mammals, stay aloft.Perhaps, the most important conclusion we have drawn from this experience is that artists can fill an important role in the visualization design pipeline. In our experience, artists routinely provide a unique source of visual insight and creativity for tackling difficult visual problems. They are also expertly trained in critiquing and refining visual works, an essential task in the iterative visualization process.The second major conclusion we have drawn from our collaborations with artists is that we need more appropriate design tools to support them and their role. We discuss here the experiences that led us to this conclusion, along with some of the tools we have developed to facilitate working with artists. The lack of appropriate design tools is particularly evident in VR. It's difficult for artists to get involved in visualization design for VR, since, with rare exceptions, you need to know how to program in order to create within the medium. VR is one of the most promising technologies for visualizing today's complex data sets. 1 However, it's also one of the technologies that can most benefit from artistic insight, since guidelines for good visual depiction are far less developed in the unconventional visual space of VR than in more traditional media.We begin by describing one of our recent major collaborative efforts, a class on designing VR scientific visualizations that was cotaught with professors and students from Brown University's computer science department and the Rhode Island School of Design's (RISD's) illustration department. Many of the experiences and conclusions relayed here are the results of this class. We then discuss three important themes that we derived from our experiences, which are all motivated by a desire to better facilitate artistic collaborations.

A Systematic Review on the Practice of Evaluating Visualization

“…In addition, Tory and Möller [66] argue that domain expert feedback can be a viable complement to controlled studies, both for heuristic evaluation of usability as well as for understanding the support of high-level cognitive tasks. However, not only the judgment of domain experts but also that of visual experts such as artists, graphic designers, or illustrators can be useful as has been shown in a few cases [1,27,29,30]-in particular since 'critique' as a technique originated from teaching in the visual arts [35]. In visualization, it can be used in combination with techniques such as sketching and ideation when developing new visualization techniques [26].…”

Drawing on Air: Input Techniques for Controlled 3D Line Illustration

“…The problem with these tools is that they fall short of the controllability needed for artists to address challenging subjects, such as the ones we find in scientific visualization [3] and even in representational art. While more traditional 3D modelers used in industry (typically driven by tablet, mouse, keyboard, and programming input) can achieve the precision needed to address these subjects, these systems are not accessible for artists that have not trained with them, and they lack the physicality and directness that artists find so compelling with hand-based 3D interfaces.…”

Superquadric Glyphs for Symmetric Second-Order Tensors

“…An interesting counterpart to our approach is the work of Keefe et al [27] that fostered the design of multi-variate fluid flow visualizations through artistic collaborations, which started with visual media and then moved to computer graphics algorithms and the constraints they impose. Our initial work in glyph design began with hand-drawn experimental versions of Figs.…”