A Model of Spatial Directness in Interactive Visualization

Description:

We discuss the concept of directness in the context of spatial interaction with visualization. In particular, we propose a model that allows practitioners to analyze and describe the spatial directness of interaction techniques, ultimately to be able to better understand interaction issues that may affect usability. To reach these goals, we distinguish between different types of directness. Each type of directness depends on a particular mapping between different spaces, for which we consider the data space, the visualization space, the output space, the user space, the manipulation space, and the interaction space. In addition to the introduction of the model itself, we also show how to apply it to several real-world interaction scenarios in visualization, and thus discuss the resulting types of spatial directness, without recommending either more direct or more indirect interaction techniques. In particular, we will demonstrate descriptive and evaluative usage of the proposed model, and also briefly discuss its generative usage.

Paper download: (12.5 MB)

Demo:

A partial demo of the measurement of the spatial directness of interaction techniques can be found as part of the OpenWalnut project at http://source.openwalnut.org/ resp. https://bsvgit.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/openwalnut/openwalnut/.

Videos:

30 second preview of presentation at IEEE :

Reference:

Stefan Bruckner, Tobias Isenberg, Timo Ropinski, and Alexander Wiebel (2019) A Model of Spatial Directness in Interactive Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 25(8):2514–2528, August 2019.

BibTeX entry:



@ARTICLE{Bruckner:2019:MSD,
  author      = {Stefan Bruckner and Tobias Isenberg and Timo Ropinski and Alexander Wiebel},
  title       = {A Model of Spatial Directness in Interactive Visualization},
  journal     = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
  year        = {2019},
  volume      = {25},
  number      = {8},
  month       = aug,
  pages       = {2514--2528},
  doi         = {10.1109/TVCG.2018.2848906},
  doi_url     = {https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2848906},
  oa_hal_url  = {https://hal.science/hal-01813889},
  gitlab_url  = {https://bsvgit.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/openwalnut/openwalnut/},
  url         = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/p/Bruckner2019MSD},
  pdf         = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/personal/papers/Bruckner_2019_MSD.pdf},
}

This work resulted from a collaboration between the Visualization Group at the University of Bergen, Norway, the AVIZ project group of Inria, France, the Visual Computing Group at the University of Ulm, Germany, and the Research Group User Experience & Visualization of the Hochschule Worms University of Applied Sciences, Germany.