CAREER: Developing Display Ecologies for Visual Analysis and Sensemaking

The ongoing proliferation of various types of displays and devices, ranging from small wearable devices to large wall displays, provide new possibilities for designing personal, professional, and educational computing tasks. In particular, using multiple displays for visual analysis and sensemaking has the potential to improve upon the capabilities of a single display screen and interface, increasing people’s ability to gain new insights from data.

However, multi-display environments present a new set of design and development challenges for visual analysis tools that coordinate across the displays: (a) combining different types of displays into a holistic visual analysis space to meet the demands of a given task; (b) distributing data, visualization views, and representations across displays; and (c) helping people make connections between these data, views, and representations across separate displays. This project addresses these challenges by building a comprehensive understanding of how multiple displays can be integrated for enhanced visual analysis and sensemaking, tools for rapidly implementing multi-display views, and methods for assessing their effectiveness for end-users.

The team will work closely with students from a number of disciplines in several local universities, creating opportunities for evaluating the systems, educating students in data science and human-computer interaction, and involving students from groups historically underrepresented in computing.

This project is designed to conceptualize and empower the concept of the display ecology, whereby heterogeneous displays interact with each other and function in concert to aid interaction, navigation, analysis, and sensemaking tasks. Effective display ecologies will aid the user in flexibly establishing and modifying the roles of each display (e.g., view, visual representations, and user interfaces), as well as assist in determining relationships among the displays according to different visual analysis needs.

This project will explore four interrelated research goals pertaining to the development of display ecologies for visual data analysis and sensemaking. The first goal is to gain design knowledge of how multiple displays and devices can create a cohesive visualization system for tackling visual analysis tasks by analyzing existing multi-display applications from the academic literature.

The second goal is to then develop display ecologies for a variety of visual analysis tasks based on the obtained design knowledge. The third goal is to incorporate and support essential aspects of the spatiality and physicality of multiple displays in a novel display ecology infrastructure based on augmented reality. The fourth goal is to integrate the results from these goals into a cohesive visual analysis system based on display ecologies; this final goal will require qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the diverse impacts of using multiple displays on visual analysis and sensemaking.

Findings from this research will guide the design and development of more effective visualization and analysis tools for multiple displays, supporting data analysis in various application domains, which continue to emerge with the explosion of available data.

This project is jointly funded by Human Centered Computing (HCC) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.