Illuminating the Path: The R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics

Jess Hemerly — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:23:12 -0800

Description

From the website:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security chartered the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC™) in 2004 with the goal of helping to counter future terrorist attacks in the U.S. and around the globe. A major objective for NVAC is to define a five-year research and development agenda for visual analytics to address the most pressing needs in R&D to facilitate advanced analytical insight.
Under the leadership of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and top researchers on the R&D Agenda Panel, a Research and Development Agenda for visual analytics was developed to define the directions and priorities for future research and development programs focused on visual analytics tools. This R&D Agenda, Illuminating the Path, provides a coordinated technical vision for government and industrial investments, and ensures that a continued stream of technology and tools enter the hands of analysts and emergency responders.

The R&D Agenda presents recommendations to advance the state of the art in the major visual analytics research areas:

The science of analytical reasoning

Visual representations and interaction techniques

Data representations and transformations

Production, presentation, and dissemination.

The R&D Agenda also includes recommendations to accelerate the ability to move the most promising research into practice and set the stage for an enduring visual analytics research community through a combination of education and research collaboration.

Source

National Visualization and Analytics Center (2005). Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics.” Richland, WA: U.S. Department of Energy, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Ambient Displays at the Human-Computer Interface

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:10:30 -0700

Description

Developments in display technology may increase the repertoire of interactions between users and digital media by increasing the number of sites for "ambient" displays.

Today, interaction with digital displays is a deskbound or device-dependent experience. However, developments in display technology may enable a new form of interaction with digital media: "ubiquitous computing". In ubiquitous computing, the physical location of data and processing power is not apparent to the user. Rather, information is made available to the user in a transparent and contextually relevant manner. A single display device restricts the repertoire of interactions between the user and digital media, so ubiquitous computing requires displays wherever the user might need one, in appliances, tabletops public transport, walls, etc. "Ambient" displays communicate on the periphery of human perception, requiring minimal attention and cognitive load.

Sites for ambient display technologies include:

Tabletop workspaces, horizontal flat displays that support multiple users moving around a common work surface
Smart walls, large-format screens that seamlessly display users' personal work environments over broadband wireless connections
Chairtop work surfaces / control pads, seating with embedded digital controls for interacting with ambient displays
Web signs, digital signs that are actually flexibly programmable Web displays for specific purposes
Public display boards, displays similar to Web signs that serve a more general function as displays for news and mobile workers" transitory interactions as they pass by
Floating augmented reality, personal information artefacts eventually viewable through lightweight head-mounted displays or perhaps in the far future through direct neural connections
Paper-thin digital displays, e-paper, and textile displays enabled by OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) and OLEPs (organic light-emitting polymers)

In developed countries, ambient displays may appear within 5 years in high-end speciality applications. Within 10 to 20 years they may find broader worldwide consumer applications as economies of scale drive manufacturing costs down."

This will be enabled by:

Decrease in OLED manufacturing costs
Introduction of new flat screen form factors
Adoption by consumers of new applications

Early indicators include:

"Universal Display Corporation's licencing of their OLED flexible display technology to Samsung
Mitsubishi Labs' prototyping of a wide range of novel ambient displays
Devotion of an entire issue (March 2005) of the Journal of the Communications of the ACM to applications and technologies of 'the disappearing computer'
The Fraunhofer Institute's research on 'roomware®' ('computer-augmented room elements like doors, walls, furniture with integrated information and communication technology')
UC Berkeley's formation of the Ambient Display Research Group to explore human factors of ambient displays
Shipment of about 31 million OLED panels in 2004, double the number shipped in 2003, according to the market research firm DisplaySearch"

What to watch:

"New display technologies and new applications are demonstrated at annual conferences such as SIGCHI (the conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) and SIGGRAPH, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
OLED display shipments double and triple as OLEDs take even more market share for MP3 players and as main displays in mobile phones.

floating augmented reality

Illuminating the Path: The R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics

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Source

Ambient Displays at the Human-Computer Interface

Description

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