Investigating the use of a dynamic physical bar chart for data exploration and presentation

Taher, Faisal and Jansen, Yvonne and Woodruff, Jonathan and Hardy, John and Hornbaek, Kasper and Alexander, Jason (2017) Investigating the use of a dynamic physical bar chart for data exploration and presentation. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 23 (1). pp. 451-460. ISSN 1077-2626

[thumbnail of VIS16_PhysicalBarChart]
Preview
PDF (VIS16_PhysicalBarChart)
VIS16_PhysicalBarChart.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (1MB)

Abstract

Physical data representations, or data physicalizations, are a promising new medium to represent and communicate data. Previous work mostly studied passive physicalizations which require humans to perform all interactions manually. Dynamic shape-changing displays address this limitation and facilitate data exploration tasks such as sorting, navigating in data sets which exceed the fixed size of a given physical display, or preparing “views” to communicate insights about data. However, it is currently unclear how people approach and interact with such data representations. We ran an exploratory study to investigate how nonexperts made use of a dynamic physical bar chart for an open-ended data exploration and presentation task. We asked 16 participants to explore a data set on European values and to prepare a short presentation of their insights using a physical display. We analyze: (1) users’ body movements to understand how they approach and react to the physicalization, (2) their hand-gestures to understand how they interact with physical data, (3) system interactions to understand which subsets of the data they explored and which features they used in the process, and (4) strategies used to explore the data and present observations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the use of dynamic data physicalizations and avenues for future work

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1700/1711
Subjects:
?? shape-changing displaysphysicalizationphysical visualizationbar chartsuser behaviourdata presentationsignal processingcomputer graphics and computer-aided designsoftwarecomputer vision and pattern recognition ??
ID Code:
82634
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
09 Nov 2016 16:00
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
31 Dec 2023 00:45