Virtual Valcamonica: collaborative exploration of prehistoric petroglyphs and their surrounding environment in multi-user virtual reality

In this paper, we present a novel, multi-user, virtual reality environment for the interactive, collaborative 3D analysis of large 3D scans and the technical advancements that were necessary to build it: a multi-view rendering system for large 3D point clouds, a suitable display infrastructure and a suite of collaborative 3D interaction techniques. The cultural heritage site of Valcamonica in Italy with its large collection of prehistoric rock-art served as an exemplary use case for evaluation. The results show that our output-sensitive level-of-detail rendering system is capable of visualizing a 3D dataset with an aggregate size of more than 14 billion points at interactive frame rates. The system design in this exemplar application results from close exchange with a small group of potential users: archaeologists with expertise in rock-art and allows them to explore the prehistoric art and its spatial context with highly realistic appearance. A set of dedicated interaction techniques was developed to facilitate collaborative visual analysis. A multi-display workspace supports the immediate comparison of geographically distributed artifacts. An expert review of the final demonstrator confirmed the potential for added value in rock-art research and the usability of our collaborative interaction techniques

SoccerStories: A Kick-off for Visual Soccer Analysis

This article presents SoccerStories, a visualization interface to support analysts in exploring soccer data and communicating interesting insights. Currently, most analyses on such data relate to statistics on individual players or teams. However, soccer analysts we collaborated with consider that quantitative analysis alone does not convey the right picture of the game, as context, player positions and phases of player actions are the most relevant aspects. We designed SoccerStories to support the current practice of soccer analysts and to enrich it, both in the analysis and communication stages. Our system provides an overview+detail interface of game phases, and their aggregation into a series of connected visualizations, each visualization being tailored for actions such as a series of passes or a goal attempt. To evaluate our tool, we ran two qualitative user studies on recent games using SoccerStories with data from one of the world's leading live sports data providers. The first study resulted in a series of four articles on soccer tactics, by a tactics analyst, who said he would not have been able to write these otherwise. The second study consisted in an exploratory follow-up to investigate design alternatives for embedding soccer phases into word-sized graphics. For both experiments, we received a very enthusiastic feedback and participants consider further use of SoccerStories to enhance their current workflow