Odysseus

There are numerous sources of environmental sensor data obtained from remote sensing including rainfall radar data, satellite data, web cam image data etc. Depending on the data source, this data is sampled at various temporal and spatial scales and arrives in various formats.

There is also environmental data obtained from in-situ sensing. This is where sensors are placed directly in the environment we wish to monitor. For example there are sensors measuring various parameters such as wind speed, wind direction, wave height, sea surface temperature etc. placed on weather buoys around the coast of Ireland.

Having multiple sources of information can be quite advantageous since individual sensor data can sometimes be quite noisy and inaccurate. Buoys can drift, sensors may need to be cleaned and hence may produce inaccurate readings, some sensors may not be as specific as others and may only provide a general indication of what is happening in the region, also sensors can go offline etc. If we are monitoring sea surface temperature off the coast of Ireland for example, we have the option of using in-situ data or satellite data to carry out the monitoring. If our in-situ sensors go offline or show abnormalities the satellite data can be used as a backup or validation tool.

The vast amount of environmental sensor data available today allows us to build up a big picture of what is happening around us. For example, if there is an increase in algal growth in the water, what were the previous conditions surrounding this - was there an increase in temperature over the previous weeks? Was there an increase in rainfall? Therefore it is important for users to be able to manipulate and visualize this information of different scales and formats as efficiently and effectively as possible in order to be able to benefit from the multitude of resources available. As a part of CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, the project will investigate these issues and link them to the problem of visualising on a novel media platform.

The visualisation of environmental sensor data could be implemented in many different media platforms depending on the scenarios we envisage for end-user's usage of such visualisation, such as Web 2.0 (desktop PC with keyboard and mouse), mobile (e.g. iPod Touch or other modern PDA), interactive TableTop (e.g. Microsoft Surface or MERL DiamondTouch), or interactive TV with remote control. Having a potentially huge amount of different data types in the environmental sensor domain, in this project we will use an ``interactive wall'' , a 3m x 1m (9.8ft  x 3.3ft) LCD wall with multi-user touch capability as our platform for visualisation, available in the CLARITY Centre. The important characteristic of the wall is that it is large and multiple people can stand in front of it and interact at the same time with the wall using their fingers. Having such a large screen allows better visualisation possibilities - stacks of web cam images and video streams, sensor readings of rainfall, temperature, pollution level, etc. can be all juxtaposed against each other by interactive geographic map, by timeline or by semantically-grouped clouds or galaxy, and the users can explore the displayed information with simple tapping, dragging and throwing motions. Furthermore, the {emph/ collaborative} nature of the interaction which the wall naturally affords could be leveraged in some way (e.g. design the visualisation in such a way as to divide the roles of the standing users and provide a set of simple coordination policy, or encourage discussions among the standing users). Public interactive wall is a novel platform that has not been researched much, and thus this project can benefit from creative thinking and quick prototyping to test our ideas, and will contribute to the environmental monitoring field within the framework of CLARITY Centre.