Representing Real-Time Multi-User Collaboration in Visualizations

Abstract

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 outside of a user's view, and specificity, or whether collaborators are depicted through abstract, generic representations or through specific means customized for the given visualization. We populate this design space with a variety of examples including generic and custom synchronized cursors, and user legends that collect these cursors together or reproduce collaborators' views as thumbnails. To build common ground, users can interact with these representations by peeking to take a quick look at a collaborator's view, tracking to follow along with a collaborator in real-time, and forking to independently explore the visualization based on a collaborator's work. We present a reference implementation of a wrapper library that converts interactive Vega-Lite charts into collaborative visualizations. We find that our approach affords synchronous collaboration across an expressive range of visual designs and interaction techniques.

From Jam Session to Recital: Synchronous Communication and Collaboration Around Data in Organizations

“…Recent research also prompts speculation over what visualization-specific functionality might assist those presenting data on these platforms [8,69]. In some remote jam sessions, functionality that provides collaborators a shared awareness of each others' interactions [44,50] could be beneficial, whereas this functionality may be less appropriate for more structured or formal presentations. Better support for performative aspects of presentation.…”

“…Recent work by Neogy et al [44] and Schwab et al's VisConnect system [50] both addressed remote synchronous collaboration, with the latter suggesting applications and roles associated with telemedicine (doctor and patient) and online education (teacher and students). We are also interested in role differentiation, such as where a designated presenter or moderator operates a software tool while others ask questions, offer explanations, or make predictions based on their experience or expertise.…”

Towards an Understanding of Distributed Asymmetric Collaborative Visualization on Problem-solving

“…However, we lack an empirical understanding of people's asymmetric collaboration experiences of using visualization for problemsolving remotely. Existing work has almost thoroughly investigated symmetric collaboration (i.e., collaborating on the same platforms) on different devices, such as PCs [2,39,41], tabletops [54], and VR [8,12,13,34]. Most close to our work, Reski et al [45] tested the usability of asymmetric collaboration between PC and VR for analyzing spatial data with map-based visualizations.…”

From Jam Session to Recital: Synchronous Communication and Collaboration Around Data in Organizations

“…Recent research also prompts speculation over what visualization-specific functionality might assist those presenting data on these platforms [9,69]. In some remote jam sessions, functionality that provides collaborators a shared awareness of each others' interactions [44,50] could be beneficial, whereas this functionality may be less appropriate for more structured or formal presentations. Better support for performative aspects of presentation.…”