Towards Immersive Humanitarian Visualizations

This paper introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a promising research area in information visualization. Humanitarian visualizations are data visualizations designed to promote human welfare. This paper explains why immersive display technologies taken broadly (e.g, virtual reality, augmented reality, ambient displays and physical representations) open up a range of opportunities for humanitarian visualization. In particular, immersive displays offer ways to make remote and hidden human suffering more salient. They also offer ways to communicate quantitative facts together with qualitative information and visceral experiences, in order to provide a holistic understanding of humanitarian issues that could support more informed humanitarian decisions. But despite some promising preliminary work, immersive humanitarian visualization has not taken off as a research topic yet. The goal of this paper is to encourage, motivate, and inspire future research in this area

Une architecture multi-dispositifs

National audienceLes boîtes à outils graphiques ne gèrent qu'un clavier, une souris et un nombre limité de techniques d'interaction. La prolifération de nouveaux dispositifs, en particulier pour les jeux, la CAO, le dessin et l'accès aux handicapés, n'est donc pas prise en compte. Cet article décrit une nouvelle architecture permettant la gestion de multiples dispositifs d'entrée et leurs connexions avec des composants actifs. Notre architecture est loin d'être achevée et pose plus de questions qu'elle n'en résout, mais c'est aussi une bonne propriété pour un travail de recherche

Étude d'une Boîte à Outils Multi-Dispositifs

International audienceLes boîtes à outils graphiques actuelles ne gèrent qu'un clavier, une souris et un nombre limité de techniques d'interaction. La prolifération de nouveaux dispositifs, en particulier pour les jeux, la CAO, le dessin et l'accès aux handicapés n'est donc pas prise en compte. Cet article présente une étude des difficultés à gérer les modes d'interaction étendus au niveau des boîtes à outils, ainsi qu'une architecture de widget découplant la gestion des événements de la présentation. Cette architecture est réminiscente du modèle MVC de Smalltalk : elle redonne son existence à la composante contrôle qui avait disparue des boîtes à outils. Cependant, notre version définit une interface générique de communication avec la partie vue du widget. Plusieurs contrôleurs peuvent fonctionner en parallèle dans le même widget, autorisant l'interaction pa- rallèle tout en évitant les conflits à un niveau de granularité correspondant aux zones visuelles gérées par le widget. Nous montrons une implémentation partielle de l'architecture dans Java Swing et décrivons quelques contrôleurs spécifiques que nous avons implémentés : un pointeur contrôlé par le clavier et un autre par la voix. Ces pointeurs coexistent et fonctionnent parallèlement sans que l'interface utilisateur ne soit modifiée

Visualisation d'information pour l'altruisme efficace

Effective altruism is a movement whose goal it to use evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible. This movement is becoming influential, but effective altruists still lack tools to help them understand complex humanitarian trade-offs and make good decisions based on data. Visualization-the study of computer-supported, visual representations of data meant to support understanding, communication, and decision makingcan help alleviate this issue. Conversely, effective altruism provides a powerful thinking framework for visualization research that focuses on humanitarian applications

Ways of Visualizing Curves

International audienceThis paper reviews the many ways curves are used to encode data in information visualization. As part of our review, we introduce a curve-based visualization framework where data can be encoded in two major ways: i) through a curve’s shape (a process we call embedding) and ii) through a curve’s local visual attributes (a process we call enrichment). Our framework helps describing and organizing the rich design space of curve-based data visualizations, and offer inspiration for novel data visualizations

Towards Immersive Humanitarian Visualizations

This paper introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a promising research area in information visualization. Humanitarian visualizations are data visualizations designed to promote human welfare. This paper explains why immersive display technologies taken broadly (e.g, virtual reality, augmented reality, ambient displays and physical representations) open up a range of opportunities for humanitarian visualization. In particular, immersive displays offer ways to make remote and hidden human suffering more salient. They also offer ways to communicate quantitative facts together with qualitative information and visceral experiences, in order to provide a holistic understanding of humanitarian issues that could support more informed humanitarian decisions. But despite some promising preliminary work, immersive humanitarian visualization has not taken off as a research topic yet. The goal of this paper is to encourage, motivate, and inspire future research in this area

The MaggLite Post-WIMP Toolkit: Draw It, Connect It and Run It

International audienceThis article presents MaggLite, a toolkit and sketch-based interface builder allowing fast and interactive design of post-WIMP user interfaces. MaggLite improves design of advanced UIs thanks to its novel mixed-graph architecture that dynamically combines scene-graphs with interaction- graphs. Scene-graphs provide mechanisms to describe and produce rich graphical effects, whereas interaction-graphs allow expressive and fine-grained description of advanced interaction techniques and behaviors such as multiple pointers management, toolglasses, bimanual interaction, gesture, and speech recognition. Both graphs can be built interactively by sketching the UI and specifying the interaction using a dataflow visual language. Communication between the two graphs is managed at runtime by components we call Interaction Access Points. While developers can extend the toolkit by refining built-in generic mechanisms, UI designers can quickly and interactively design, prototype and test advanced user interfaces by applying the MaggLite principle: "draw it, connect it and run it"

Accounting for Chance Agreement in Gesture Elicitation Studies

The level of agreement among participants is a key aspect of gesture elicitation studies, and it is typically quantified by means of agreement rates (AR). We show that this measure is problematic, as it does not account for chance agreement. The problem of chance agreement has been extensively discussed in a range of scientific fields in the context of inter-rater reliability studies. We review chance-corrected agreement coefficients that are routinely used in inter-reliability studies and show how to apply them to gesture elicitation studies. We also discuss how to compute interval estimates for these coefficients and how to use them for statistical inference

Visualization-Mediated Alleviation of the Planning Fallacy

International audienceThe planning fallacy, i.e., people’s tendency to underestimate the time required to complete a project despite past failures, is ubiquitous and resistant to coping strategies. We propose scenarios where visualizations may help alleviate this problem, motivated by previous research in psychology. We hope that with the help of visualizations, people will become more reliable in their judgments and work together in a way that is both more productive and more gratifying