V<sc>is</sc>T<sc>iles</sc>: Coordinating and Combining Co-located Mobile Devices for Visual Data Exploration

Abstract

We present VISTILES, a conceptual framework that uses a set of mobile devices to distribute and coordinate visualization views for the exploration of multivariate data. In contrast to desktop-based interfaces for information visualization, mobile devices offer the potential to provide a dynamic and user-defined interface supporting co-located collaborative data exploration with different individual workflows. As part of our framework, we contribute concepts that enable users to interact with coordinated & multiple views (CMV) that are distributed across several mobile devices. The major components of the framework are: (i) dynamic and flexible layouts for CMV focusing on the distribution of views and (ii) an interaction concept for smart adaptations and combinations of visualizations utilizing explicit side-by-side arrangements of devices. As a result, users can benefit from the possibility to combine devices and organize them in meaningful spatial layouts. Furthermore, we present a web-based prototype implementation as a specific instance of our concepts. This implementation provides a practical application case enabling users to explore a multivariate data collection. We also illustrate the design process including feedback from a preliminary user study, which informed the design of both the concepts and the final prototype.

AdaM

“…Existing toolkits have explored cross device interaction with combinations of mobile devices [13,37,41,47,48], mobile/desktop devices [15,28,32,34], mobile/display wall devices [1,21] and wearables [2,10,17]. Alternative approaches have focused on the development of conceptual frameworks [23,39]. Within this work, common applications which support multiple people, with cross device interactions, include authoring [21], web browsing [9,14,26] and collaborative visualizations [1].…”

GazeConduits: Calibration-Free Cross-Device Collaboration through Gaze and Touch

“…Cross-device systems [1] afford new interactions for sense making [18,48], curation [2], sharing media [19], and collaborative content editing [16]. Usually, these setups distribute an interface across a number of devices like tablets, smartphones, interactive walls or tabletops, and provide techniques to effectively use the input/output modalities of these multi-device setups.…”

Towards Visualizing and Exploring Multivariate Networks on Mobile Devices

“…Distributed Interfaces. Particularly interesting is distributing the interface across multiple devices [8,11]. Each device can then show one view, and their combination results in a multi-view setup (Figure 1).…”

“…Spatial-awareness of Mobile Devices. As a promising extension of co-located distributed interfaces, the spatial arrangement of devices could be used to activate certain functionalities, e.g., combining displays into one screen space, adapting encodings to foster comparison, or indicating overview+detail constellations [11]. Such concepts have been presented in the general context of visualizations, but have not been investigated in detail for networks yet.…”