Life in 2.5D: Animal Movement in the Trees

The complex, interconnected, and non-contiguous nature of canopy environments present unique cognitive, locomotor, and sensory challenges to their animal inhabitants. Animal movement through forest canopies is constrained; unlike most aquatic or aerial habitats, the three-dimensional space of a forest canopy is not fully realized or available to the animals within it. Determining how the unique constraints of arboreal habitats shape the ecology and evolution of canopy-dwelling animals is key to fully understanding forest ecosystems. With emerging technologies, there is now the opportunity to quantify and map tree connectivity, and to embed the fine-scale horizontal and vertical position of moving animals into these networks of branching pathways. Integrating detailed multi-dimensional habitat structure and animal movement data will enable us to see the world from the perspective of an arboreal animal. This synthesis will shed light on fundamental aspects of arboreal animals’ cognition and ecology, including how they navigate landscapes of risk and reward and weigh energetic trade-offs, as well as how their environment shapes their spatial cognition and their social dynamics

Interaction with Multiple Data Visualizations Through Natural Language Commands

Data exploration stands to benefit from environments that permit users to examine and juxtapose many views of data, particularly views that present diverse selections of data values and attributes. Large, high-resolution environments are capable of showing many related views of data, but efficiently creating and displaying visualizations in these environments presents significant challenges. In this dissertation, I will present my research on “multi-view data exploration interactions” that enable users to create sets of views with coherent data value and attribute variations, through multi-modal speech and mid-air pointing gestures in large display environments. This work enables users to rapidly and efficiently generate sets of views in support of multi-view data exploration tasks, organize these views in coherent collections, and operate on sets of views collectively, rather than individually, to efficiently reach large portions of the ’data and attribute space’. I will present three contributions: 1) an observational study of data exploration in a large display environment with speech and mid-air gestures, 2) ’Traverse’, an interaction technique for data exploration, based on this study, which uses natural language to create and pivot sets of views, and 3) ’Ditto’, a multi-modal speech and mid-air pointing gesture interactive environment, which utilizes the multi-view data exploration technique, in large display environments