Odysseus

The past decade has seen organisations rapidly amassing data, often in an ad-hoc manner. The provision of massive storage and system technologies are increasingly outstripping our abilities to effective analyse and explore such voluminous data. Clearly, this raw data is of little value unless useful information and hence knowledge can be derived from it. This growth in data collection can be attributed to a number of factors including, disk space and computer networking. The cost of data storage has fallen dramatically while its capacity has steadily increased. As such, it is becoming increasingly apparent that more powerful graphical information exploration tools are required as the amount and complexity of data that such tools are expected to handle steadily increases.

Visual Data Analysis has evolved beyond the single user studying and understanding voluminous data sets into larger team based efforts. Such studies in data exploration suggest the need to support pair-process or collaborative data study. One such opportunity comes from the use of collaborative tabletop environments supported by hardware such as the DiamondTouch. These devices are based on a novel style of multi-user touch-driven human computer interaction. The exploration of applications based on such interfaces are at an early research stage. Examples of such applications include map browsing, photo sharing, drawing and editing, document and content sharing, video games, calendars and room planning.

The motivation for this project is to explore a collaborative data visualisation task (relational information visualisation) across a range of interfaces in a shared working environment. In this research project we focus our attention on visualisation across the desk and across the network divide using a combination of the DiamondTouch, Tablet PC and large tiled displays (driven by DCV).

In the first year this project will couple a large tiled display, diamondtouch and tablet PC to support a 3D data visualisation system with multiple users interacting locally with data. Years two and beyond will integrate new forms of interaction along with more sophisticated interaction schemes for distributed collaborative interaction. Our target domain is the large scale information visualisation (Graph Drawing) which will drive the choice of components underpinning this work. The current component set includes (DiamondSpin, Tablet SDK, DCV, VNC and WilmaScope).

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratory:

This project will see a summer scholar working on the integration of DCV with the DiamondSpin SDK and a tablet PC . This scholar will also work in conjunction with a PhD student who is researching aspects of a larger "Pervasive Visualisation" system for the IVG. IVG is an Imaging, Visualisation & Graphics Laboratory, based in the School of Computer Science and Informatics in UCD and is a new facility of the Institute of Integrated Informatics. This multi-disciplinary laboratory supports collaboration between a number of schools, international collaborators and industrial partners. The laboratory is currently supported by UCD's Computer Services (IBM Visualisation Cluster) and UCD's CSI. With equipment and software from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (DiamondTouch) and IBM Deep Computing Visualization system.

Supervisors:

Dr. Aaron Quigley and Dr. Lorcan Coyle.

Keywords:

Graph Drawing, Data Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Distributed Computing.

Links:

http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch/
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/visualization/