Snap2Diverse: Coordinating Information Visualizations and Virtual Environments

The field of Information Visualization is concerned with improving with how users perceive, understand, and interact with visual representations of data sets. Immersive Virtual Environments (VEs) excel at providing researchers and designers a greater comprehension of the spatial features and relations of their data, models, and scenes. This project addresses the intersection of these two fields where information is visualized in a virtual environment. Specifically we are interested in visualizing abstract information in relation to spatial information in the context of a virtual environment. We describe a set of design issues for this type of integrated visualization and demonstrate a coordinated, multiple-views system supporting 2D and 3D visualization tasks such as overview, navigation, details-on-demand, and brushing-and-linking selection. Software architecture issues are discussed with details of our implementation applied to the domain of chemical information and visualization. Lastly, we subject our system to an informal usability evaluation and identify usability issues with interaction and navigation that may guide future work in these situations

Effect of Information Modality on Geographic Cognition in

Much research has focused on exploring the safest ways to present navigational information in vehicles. However, these efforts often neglect to focus on other measures of driver performance that may affect user satisfaction. Drivers may wish to gain an understanding of a geographic area in addition to simply navigating to a specific location. In this article, we complete an empirical study with tradeoff-based results of four navigational information modalities including visual only, visual with overhead map, audio only, and audio with overhead map based on their levels of interruption, reaction, and comprehension. Results confirm the safety of audio only implementations, but also show the strength of visual with overhead map for facilitating geographic cognition