Designing Interaction for Token Based Physical Visualizations

This project explores the design of different manual and semi-automatic instruments to support interaction with token-based physical data visualizations (or physicalizations). The recent advance in digital fabrication has made data physicalization – encoding data in the geometry or material properties of a physical artifact – a growing research interest in the information visualization community. However, interaction with data physicalizations still remains a challenge and most existing examples to date remain static. The objective of this project is the
development of several instruments that facilitate the interaction with token-based physicalizations and evaluate their effectiveness. We will further explore which material and physical properties (e.g. weight, friction, form, size) can be used to represent data and support
interaction with the instruments we develop. Our hypothesis is that the use of manual and semiautomatic tools can improve the efficiency of interacting with token-based physicalizations and support standard data operations (e.g. selection, filtering, and aggregation).

Faculty Supervisor:

Sheelagh Carpendale

Student:

Partner:

Inria Saclay - Île-de-France Research Centre

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

University:

University of Calgary

Program:

Globalink Research Award