Evaluating the efficiency of physical visualizations

Abstract

Figure 1. Examples of physical visualizations: a) electricity consumption over one year with each day split into 30min intervals (Detroit Edison electrical company, 1935); b) data sculpture showing a world map of GDP (wooden base) and derivatives volume (wireframe) (Andreas Nicolas Fischer, 2008); c) 3D bar charts depicting the evolution of country indicators over time built specifically for our study. ABSTRACTData sculptures are an increasingly popular form of physical visualization whose purposes are essentially artistic, communicative or educational. But can physical visualizations help carry out actual information visualization tasks? We present the first infovis study comparing physical to on-screen visualizations. We focus on 3D visualizations, as these are common among physical visualizations but known to be problematic on computers. Taking 3D bar charts as an example, we show that moving visualizations to the physical world can improve users' efficiency at information retrieval tasks. In contrast, augmenting on-screen visualizations with stereoscopic rendering alone or with prop-based manipulation was of limited help. The efficiency of physical visualizations seems to stem from features that are unique to physical objects, such as their ability to be touched and their perfect visual realism. These findings provide empirical motivation for current research on fast digital fabrication and self-reconfiguring interfaces.

Active Reading of Visualizations

“…For example, P2 held a node with one finger while pointing to its connected nodes as she followed outgoing links. These actions are similar to those observed in the context of physical visualizations [34].…”

The Visual and Beyond

“…The transcripts show that the haptic and auditory modalities seem to heighten this sense of solicitation, as our participants recalled numerous episodes where they positioned themselves, or the probe to enhance their perception of the data representation; participants interacting with the visual probe did not employ these actions. While the HCI community has embraced the role of the human body in interaction design and cognition [31,33,36,37,38,43,55,63], the role of the body in data representation has received little attention, with notable exceptions [26,29]. Our findings suggest that representing data beyond the visual modality affords designers opportunities to promote full-body experiences of data; encouraging people to use their body in way that is not commonplace today with information visualizations.…”

Point-and-Shake

“…A small body of work has investigated physical visualisations (visualisations that map data to physical form [11]) composed of levitating objects. This has advantages over other physical visualisation media (e.g., those that are 3D printed or hand-crafted) because they can be updated and animated dynamically, since their form is changeable.…”

“…As another example, visualisation software could construct physical representations of data using levitating objects, which users could then interact with and query, by selecting a data point to learn more about it. Physical visualisation of data in this way may improve information retrieval from 3D datasets, compared to visualisations on a screen [11].…”