GeoCamera: Telling Stories in Geographic Visualizations with Camera Movements

In geographic data videos, camera movements are frequently used and combined to present information from multiple perspectives. However, creating and editing camera movements requires significant time and professional skills. This work aims to lower the barrier of crafting diverse camera movements for geographic data videos. First, we analyze a corpus of 66 geographic data videos and derive a design space of camera movements with a dimension for geospatial targets and one for narrative purposes. Based on the design space, we propose a set of adaptive camera shots and further develop an interactive tool called GeoCamera. This interactive tool allows users to flexibly design camera movements for geographic visualizations. We verify the expressiveness of our tool through case studies and evaluate its usability with a user study. The participants find that the tool facilitates the design of camera movements.Comment: 15 pages. Published as a conference paper at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 202

A knowledge-based system design/information tool

The objective of this effort was to develop a Knowledge Capture System (KCS) for the Integrated Test Facility (ITF) at the Dryden Flight Research Facility (DFRF). The DFRF is a NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) facility. This system was used to capture the design and implementation information for NASA's high angle-of-attack research vehicle (HARV), a modified F/A-18A. In particular, the KCS was used to capture specific characteristics of the design of the HARV fly-by-wire (FBW) flight control system (FCS). The KCS utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge-based system (KBS) technology. The KCS enables the user to capture the following characteristics of automated systems: the system design; the hardware (H/W) design and implementation; the software (S/W) design and implementation; and the utilities (electrical and hydraulic) design and implementation. A generic version of the KCS was developed which can be used to capture the design information for any automated system. The deliverable items for this project consist of the prototype generic KCS and an application, which captures selected design characteristics of the HARV FCS

Approximating the Practice of Mathematics Teaching: What Learning Can Web-based, Multimedia Storyboarding Software Enable?

We build on Grossman's notion of approximations of practice as scaled-down representations of practice that enable preservice teachers (PSTs) to learn to teach by doing. We propose the use of media rich, collaborative web-authoring tools for PSTs to create, complete, or edit scenarios in which they practice particular activities of teaching such as explaining a mathematics concept or reviewing students' work. We explain in what way these environments can be used to fit the notion of approximations of practice. We illustrate that contention by describing our experience using the web-based software Depict (in the LessonSketch platform) in the teaching of secondary mathematics methods. This use of multimedia scenarios combines the advantages of visual and video-based approaches to the study of practice with those approaches that ask the PSTs to create scenarios (e.g., lesson plays). We argue the value of integrating this storyboarding web software in a larger environment where scenarios can be created collaboratively, annotated, and commented on in forums.The work reported here has been done with the support of National Science Foundation grants ESI-0353285 and DRL- 0918425 to P. Herbst and D. Chazan.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108386/1/Approximating_Practice_by_Storyboarding_R.pdf-1Description of Approximating_Practice_by_Storyboarding_R.pdf : Main articl

Improving Provenance Data Interaction for Visual Storytelling in Medical Imaging Data Exploration

Effective collaborative work in diagnostic medical imaging is not trivial due to the large amounts of complex data involved,a (non-linear) workflow involving experts in different domains, and a lack of versatility in the current tools employed inhealthcare. In this paper, we aim to introduce how the integration of visual storytelling techniques together with provenancedata in the analytic systems used in medicine can compensate for these issues, by enhancing communication of results andreproducibility of findings through diagnostic provenance data. To this end, we illustrate how we can improve the interactionwith provenance data displayed in a graph in order to facilitate authoring and the creation process of visual data storie

Zoomable User Interfaces for the Authoring and Delivery of Slide Presentations

Millions of slide presentations are being authored and delivered with computer software every day. Yet much of the computer's power for these tasks remains untapped. Existing interaction techniques leave presenters wrestling with limited size computer displays to get meaningful overviews of their work. Without these overviews, they have trouble finding patterns in their data and experimenting with alternate organizations. They also have difficulty communicating the structure of large or complex talks to the audience and keeping the audience oriented during unexpected transitions between ideas. A natural solution is Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) since they offer the capability to view information at multiple levels of detail and smoothly transition between ideas. This work presents two ZUIs, Niagara and CounterPoint, for authoring and delivering slide presentations. Niagara is a ZUI workspace for authoring presentation content with techniques to improve authoring in the zoomable environment. Empirical evaluations of ZUI-based authoring tools revealed performance improvements and subjective preferences over folder-based interfaces for organization tasks. Users were 30% faster with ZUIs than with folders in completing a simplified shape organization task. Some classes of users were also faster with ZUIs than with folders in completing a text-based organization task. Users performing both tasks exhibited a strong preference for ZUIs over folders. CounterPoint provides a number of features to simplify the creation and delivery of ZUI presentations. The effects of these presentations on the audience were evaluated in a controlled comparison of presentations with slides only, slides with spatial layouts, and slides with spatial layouts and animation. The study revealed a strong subjective preference and higher ratings of organization for presentations with spatial layout. Feedback was also gathered from presenters who used CounterPoint to deliver over 100 real-world presentations. They indicated that CounterPoint helped them communicate overviews and multi-level presentation structures. More experienced CounterPoint presenters also found that CounterPoint helped them keep the audience oriented when navigating the presentation in response to audience feedback

Scalable Exploration of Complex Objects and Environments Beyond Plain Visual Replication​

Digital multimedia content and presentation means are rapidly increasing their sophistication and are now capable of describing detailed representations of the physical world. 3D exploration experiences allow people to appreciate, understand and interact with intrinsically virtual objects. Communicating information on objects requires the ability to explore them under different angles, as well as to mix highly photorealistic or illustrative presentations of the object themselves with additional data that provides additional insights on these objects, typically represented in the form of annotations. Effectively providing these capabilities requires the solution of important problems in visualization and user interaction. In this thesis, I studied these problems in the cultural heritage-computing-domain, focusing on the very common and important special case of mostly planar, but visually, geometrically, and semantically rich objects. These could be generally roughly flat objects with a standard frontal viewing direction (e.g., paintings, inscriptions, bas-reliefs), as well as visualizations of fully 3D objects from a particular point of views (e.g., canonical views of buildings or statues). Selecting a precise application domain and a specific presentation mode allowed me to concentrate on the well defined use-case of the exploration of annotated relightable stratigraphic models (in particular, for local and remote museum presentation). My main results and contributions to the state of the art have been a novel technique for interactively controlling visualization lenses while automatically maintaining good focus-and-context parameters, a novel approach for avoiding clutter in an annotated model and for guiding users towards interesting areas, and a method for structuring audio-visual object annotations into a graph and for using that graph to improve guidance and support storytelling and automated tours. We demonstrated the effectiveness and potential of our techniques by performing interactive exploration sessions on various screen sizes and types ranging from desktop devices to large-screen displays for a walk-up-and-use museum installation. KEYWORDS - Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, Interactive Lenses, Focus-and-Context, Annotated Models, Cultural Heritage Computing