Last month we had the pleasure to attend the CHI’16 conference in San José, USA. ACM CHI is the international top conference for Human-Computer Interaction. It brings together top researchers from academia and industry from around the world.
Knowing where people look at when they investigate visual stimuli such as pictures and video content provides valuable information for multiple application scenarios. The investigation of viewing behavior has become a popular approach that provides a glimpse into the human mind. May it be a person sitting in front of a computer screen or walking in the park, different eye-tracking devices can record where and how long a person spent visual attention for nearly all possible visual stimuli. Depending on the device, up to 2000 gaze positions per second and the visual stimulus can be recorded for an individual person. Typically, many more persons are recorded in a user study, and the goal is to compare this massive amount of data in order to find similarities as well as outliers in the viewing behavior.
Vehicle handling is a task that places high demands on our visual system. When driving a car, we have to constantly attend to visual factors such as our distance to the car in front of us, our lane-position, road-signs, and more. Therefore, perceptual distraction during driving can be expected to impair our ability to handle a vehicle. Nonetheless, some levels of distractibility can sometimes be beneficial – it can grant us access to unanticipated events that might be relevant. In our new article, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, we investigate how neural activity changes in order to maintain the balance between driving performance and the perception and processing of events outside of the focus of our visual attention.
Last month I had the pleasure to attend the ETRA 2016 symposium in Charleston, USA. This conference focuses on all aspects of eye movement research across a wide range of disciplines. Computer scientists, engineers and behavioral scientists come together to bring their common vision of moving eye tracking research and its application forward, and expanding its impact. This year many good and interesting talks were held during the conference and now I want to talk about two papers I found particularly interesting.
Can you imagine the social connections people had at the beginning of the 20th century? They had their family and a strong connection to neighbors. Most probably friends were living in the same village or in the next town. You could have painted a bubble for each person you knew on one sheet of paper and even would have had room enough to put the name in the middle – a network easy to analyze. One century later we are dealing with huge networks that allow us to model and study many real world phenomena since they are capable of representing pairwise relations between the items of interest. Arlind Nocajs’ graduate thesis “Untangling Networks: Focus on Less to See More” emphasizes certain aspects using various visualization techniques and graph drawing methods.
How did the formation of our landscape develop? Where did existing dolines and terraces arise? And why are there special valley configurations, meander or further landscape shapes, for example dunes directly in Baden-Württemberg? These are only some of the questions geology scientists like Prof. Hartmut Seyfried and his research assistant Elena Beckenbach (Institute of Planetology, University of Stuttgart) try to answer in their research work. Recently they presented their newest results based on a new visualization of the landscape of Baden-Württemberg to members of the Office for Geo-Information and Land Development (LGL) at the Powerwall of the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart (VISUS).
In January a group of artists and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge (USA), visited the Computer Graphics Group of the University of Konstanz (Prof. Deussen) to evaluate e-David, our painting robot. Together with Benjamin Tritt, a well known American Artist, they analyzed the different methods of painterly abstraction.
Maps for public transport as busses, subways or trains are part of our daily live. It is self-evident for most of us to read them and we expect them to be designed in a way that we can plan our journeys easily. But who cares about the usability and the design? And how can we be guaranteed that the map design invokes an accurate action by the passengers? Design experts and visualization researchers are working closely together to produce readable and effective map designs.
Whenever we want to change things and strive for new visions, we have to understand an existing system in the first place. For that purpose scientists are working on extensive tests and studies, they take measurements and collect statistical data. The more understandable and evident their data collections are, the easier they will gain new findings and subsequently explain their results and ideas to others. With increasing complexity of the data and considering that properties and parameters may change over time, it becomes difficult to analyze the data manually. Visual computing scientists work on new applications and new methods for a better handling of this data using software systems.
It is daily business for researchers across all disciplines to search for, read, and structure scientific publications. Over the years, they become experts in a specific area, having an overview of hundreds of publications within this domain. To share their knowledge, they eventually publish a literature overview in form of state of the art report or part of a book or thesis. These overview publications structure and aggregate the literature on a high level of abstraction. However, they do not yet provide an interactively explorable list of publications leveraging the detailed knowledge of the authors.