Achim Ebert

Human-centered visualization environments

What do you do to start reading human centered visualization environments? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. Its not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this human centered visualization environments.

A functional framework for Web-based information visualization systems

The accelerating evolution of information visualization research in the last few years has led to several specific system implementations. The obvious drawbacks of this development are highly dependent software systems, which are only available for a restricted number of users. Today, due to the remarkable advances in hardware and software technologies, not only very expensive graphics workstations, but also low-cost PCs are capable of running computational demanding visualization systems. Furthermore, the rapid development of the medium World Wide Web along with state-of-the-art Internet programming techniques has led to a trend toward more generally usable visualization systems. In this paper, we propose a functional developers framework for general Web-based visualization systems which makes intelligent use of application specific software and hardware components on the server side, as well as Javas benefits on the client side. To demonstrate the frameworks abilities, we have applied it to two practical visualization tasks and report on our experience concerning practicability and pitfalls.

{EEG}-based measurement of subjective parameters in evaluations

Evaluating new approaches, be it new interaction techniques, new applications or even new hardware, is an important task, which has to be done to ensure both usability and user satisfaction. The drawback of evaluating subjective parameters is that this can be relatively time consuming, and the outcome is possibly quite imprecise. Considering the recent release of cost-efficient commercial EEG headsets, we propose the utilization of electro-encephalographic (EEG) devices for evaluation purposes. The goal of our research is to evaluate if a commercial EEG headset can provide cutting-edge support during user studies and evaluations. Our results are encouraging and suggest that wireless EEG technology is a viable alternative for measuring subjectivity in evaluation scenarios.

Dynamic Visualization and Navigation of Semantic Virtual Environments

Although information visualization claims to provide the means to induce mental models of any kind of data, the visualization of semantic information is still an open field of research. Existing approaches either concentrate on the visualization of documents without additional metadata or produce unintuitive expert graphics. This paper seeks to fill this gap by presenting a semantic information visualization system with a dynamic 3D interface and intuitive metaphors. The application called DocuWorld visualizes documents, document meta-data, and semantic relations between documents. The general visualization and navigation metaphor called Thought Wizard Metaphor allows user- and context-sensitive adaption of visualization modes and visualization environments

Flexible Gesture Recognition for Immersive Virtual Environments

With powerful graphics hardware becoming affordable for everyone, there is an increasing tendency towards a new generation of user interfaces, with the focus shifting from traditional two-dimensional desktops to three-dimensional virtual environments. Therefore, there is a growing need for applicable immersive interaction metaphors to manipulate these environments. In our paper we propose a gesture recognition engine using an inexpensive data glove with integrated 6 DOF tracking. Despite of noisy input data from the glove, we are able to achieve reliable and flexible gesture recognition. New gestures can be trained easily and existing gestures can be individually adapted for different users

2D meets 3D: a human-centered interface for visual data exploration

There is still a controversial debate on the usefulness of 3D user interfaces. Most of the time, 2D metaphors are force-fitted to establish a rich set of functionality. With the aim of shifting the 20-year-old 2D WIMP (windows, icons, menus, and pointing device) paradigm towards a more natural and intuitive 3D user interface, we have developed a hybrid 2D + 3D prototype targeted at immersive environments. Our complementary display and interaction environment combines visual design techniques with mixed-mode interaction to support typical tasks of information workers to the greatest potential. To achieve this, we match visualization and interaction metaphors by the principle of dimensional congruence. This results in a sophisticated and more intuitive user interface. An ongoing evaluation gives encouraging feedback and shows that even non-expert users can efficiently work with the system.

Human-centered interaction with documents

In this paper, we discuss a new user interface, a complementary environment for the work with personal document archives, i.e. for document filing and retrieval. We introduce our implementation of a spatial medium for document interaction, explorative search and active navigation, which exploits and further stimulates the human strengths of visual information processing. Our system achieves a high degree of immersion of the user, so that he/she forgets the artificiality of his/her environment. This is done by means of a tripartite ensemble of allowing users to interact naturally with gestures and postures (as an option gestures and postures can be individually taught to the system by users), exploiting 3D technology, and supporting the user to maintain structures he/she discovers, as well as provide computer calculated semantic structures. Our ongoing evaluation shows that even non-expert users can efficiently work with the information in a document collection, and have fun.

Visualization and Evolution of Software Architectures

Software systems are an integral component of our everyday life as we find them in tools and embedded in equipment all around us. In order to ensure smooth, predictable, and accurate operation of these systems, it is crucial to produce and maintain systems that are highly reliable. A well-designed and well-maintained architecture goes a long way in achieving this goal. However, due to the intangible and often complex nature of software architecture, this task can be quite complicated. The field of software architecture visualization aims to ease this task by providing tools and techniques to examine the hierarchy, relationship, evolution, and quality of architecture components. In this paper, we present a discourse on the state of the art of software architecture visualization techniques. Further, we highlight the importance of developing solutions tailored to meet the needs and requirements of the stakeholders involved in the analysis process.

Measuring Subjectivity : Supporting Evaluations with the Emotiv EPOC Neuroheadset

Since the dawn of the industrial era, modern devices and interaction methods have undergone rigorous evaluations in order to ensure their functionality and quality, as well as usability. While there are many methods for measuring objective data, capturing and interpreting subjective factors—like the feelings or states of mind of the users—is still an imprecise and usually post-event process. In this paper we propose the utilization of the Emotiv EPOC commercial electroencephalographic (EEG) neuroheadset for real-time support during evaluations and user studies. We show in two evaluation scenarios that the wireless EPOC headsets can be used efficiently for supporting subjectivity measurement. Additionally, we highlight situations that may result in a lower accuracy, as well as explore possible reasons and propose solutions for improving the error rates of the device.

Preattentive visualization of information relevance

When presenting complex, multidimensional data to users, emphasis of relevant information plays an important role. Especially when data is arranged according to several criteria, the simultaneous use of multiple visualization metaphors frequently results in information overload and unintuitive visualizations. In this paper, we present a comparison of preattentive visual features specifically for highlighting relevance of data extracted from electronic documents in an information-rich virtual environment. Several visual cues were evaluated with regard to their effectivity, comprehensibility and influence on other visualized features. At the same time we introduce two innovative data handling techniques to achieve practical applicability of our system: An intuitive way to reduce visual cluttering of information by filtering information based on its visual depth and a way to efficiently utilize visualizations of different dimensions - dimensional congruence.