Daniel Cernea

Collaborative visualization: definition, challenges, and research agenda

The conflux of two growing areas of technology – collaboration and visualization – into a new research direction, collaborative visualization, provides new research challenges. Technology now allows us to easily connect and collaborate with one another – in settings as diverse as over networked computers, across mobile devices, or using shared displays such as interactive walls and tabletop surfaces. Digital information is now regularly accessed by multiple people in order to share information, to view it together, to analyze it, or to form decisions. Visualizations are used to deal more effectively with large amounts of information while interactive visualizations allow users to explore the underlying data. While researchers face many challenges in collaboration and in visualization, the emergence of collaborative visualization poses additional challenges, but it is also an exciting opportunity to reach new audiences and applications for visualization tools and techniques. The purpose of this article is (1) to provide a definition, clear scope, and overview of the evolving field of collaborative visualization, (2) to help pinpoint the unique focus of collaborative visualization with its specific aspects, challenges, and requirements within the intersection of general computer-supported cooperative work and visualization research, and (3) to draw attention to important future research questions to be addressed by the community. We conclude by discussing a research agenda for future work on collaborative visualization and urge for a new generation of visualization tools that are designed with collaboration in mind from their very inception.

Fluid interaction for information visualization

Despite typically receiving little emphasis in visualization research, interaction in visualization is the catalyst for the users dialogue with the data, and, ultimately, the users actual understanding and insight into these data. There are many possible reasons for this skewed balance between the visual and interactive aspects of a visualization. One reason is that interaction is an intangible concept that is difficult to design, quantify, and evaluate. Unlike for visual design, there are few examples that show visualization practitioners and researchers how to design the interaction for a new visualization in the best manner. In this article, we attempt to address this issue by collecting examples of visualizations with ‘best-in-class’ interaction and using them to extract practical design guidelines for future designers and researchers. We call this concept fluid interaction, and we propose an operational definition in terms of the direct manipulation and embodied interaction paradigms, the psychological concept of ‘flow’, and Normans gulfs of execution and evaluation.

Real-Time scale invariant 3d range point cloud registration

Stereo cameras, laser rangers and other time-of-flight ranging devices are utilized with increasing frequency as they can provide information in the 3D plane. The ability to perform real-time registration of the 3D point clouds obtained from these sensors is important in many applications. However, the tasks of locating accurate and dependable correspondences between point clouds and registration can be quite slow. Furthermore, any algorithm must be robust against artifacts in 3D range data as sensor motion, reflection and refraction are commonplace. The SIFT feature detector is a robust algorithm used to locate features, but cannot be extended directly to the 3D range point clouds since it requires dense pixel information, whereas the range voxels are sparsely distributed. This paper proposes an approach which enables SIFT application to locate scale and rotation invariant features in 3D point clouds. The algorithm then utilizes the known point correspondence registration algorithm in order to achieve real-time registration of 3D point clouds.

{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.

A survey of technologies on the rise for emotion-enhanced interaction

Emotions are a major part of the human existence and social interactions. Some might say that emotions are one of the aspects that make us truly human. However, while we express emotions in various life settings, the world of computing seems to struggle with supporting and incorporating the emotional dimension. In the last decades, the concept of affect has gotten a new upswing in research, moving beyond topics like market research and product development, and further exploring the area of emotion-enhanced interaction. In this paper, we highlight techniques that have been employed more intensely for emotion measurement in the context of affective interaction. Besides capturing the functional principles behind these approaches and the inherent volatility of human emotions, we present relevant applications and establish a categorization of the roles of emotion detection in interaction. Based on these findings, we also capture the main challenges that emotion measuring technologies will have to overcome in order to enable a truly seamless emotion-driven interaction.

Tangible and wearable user interfaces for supporting collaboration among emergency workers

Ensuring a constant flow of information is essential for offering quick help in different types of disasters. In the following, we report on a work-in-progress distributed, collaborative and tangible system for supporting crisis management. On one hand, field operators need devices that collect information--personal notes and sensor data--without interrupting their work. On the other hand, a disaster management system must operate in different scenarios and be available to people with different preferences, backgrounds and roles. Our work addresses these issues by introducing a multi-level collaborative system that manages real-time data flow and analysis for various rescue operators.

Controlling In-Vehicle Systems with a Commercial EEG Headset: Performance and Cognitive Load

Humans have dreamed for centuries to control their surroundings solely by the power of theirminds. These aspirations have been captured by multiple science fiction creations, like theNeuromancer no ...

A multi-AUV missions simulation framework for the USARSim Robotics Simulator

The maximum potential for underwater exploration rests within the use of multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and tasks involving human diver-AUV coordination. Such tasks require dependable underwater wireless communications, which normally utilize the rapidly varying acoustic channel. Rigorous testing of underwater acoustic communication systems is necessary to develop a dependable network, however, the high offshore testing costs make this difficult. Though simulators could aid the development of such AUV communication systems, the few existing simulators focus upon simulating a single vehicle and, as such, do not provide tools for simulating underwater communication systems. In this paper we present an underwater communications simulation framework designed for the Unified System for Automation and Robotics Simulator (USARSim). This simulation tool is capable of modeling networked communications between, or with, AUVs by accurately characterizing the underwater acoustic channel. Details on this simulation framework are provided along with some results obtained during development of this tool.

HMD-enabled Virtual Screens as Alternatives to Large Physical Displays

Large displays are one of the core components of visualizing large-scale data sets, allowing users to render a larger amount of information and present it in the corresponding context. However, these displays still have many disadvantages, like the high costs that increase exponentially with display size and the immobility of the display setups. In this paper, we introduce a virtual large screen that is designed as an alternative to physical large displays. It is implemented with the help of the Oculus Rift head mounted display (HMD). Users wearing the virtual glasses are able to see and explore a virtual screen and make use of its size advantages without the cost and location restrictions of the physical counterpart. A preliminary evaluation of our system suggests that the users perception and cognitive abilities are similar for both working on large physical displays and our large virtual screens.

TangibleRings: nestable circular tangibles

The multitouch functionality of tabletop computers is often augmented by the use of tangible objects that offer an intuitive and haptic alternative to interaction and manipulation. However, employing tangibles can also lead to less desirable effects, such as occlusion or lack of precision. In this paper we highlight the design and implementation of ring-like tangible objects: TangibleRings. They do not occlude the objects underneath them and also support the detection of touch events inside their perimeter. Additionally, multiple rings may be nested within one another in order to combine ring functionality or produce more complex filters.