Imprint: The content of this blog entry is based on VR experiments in the context of projects carried out in the scope of the authors masters degree studies at FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Doris Agotai.
Based on the insight and inspiration through the State of the Art research we developed some conceptual scenarios for our use case. These scenarios propose three different interface metaphors for possible solution approaches how the given archival dataset could be presented in the VR space and what forms of interaction would benefit the targeted user group. The overarching goal of all scenarios is to offer new perspectives and give more context to the data.
Worldmap
focus on giving context to the geographical aspects of the dataset
data points will be positioned in the area of their geographical place of origin on a world map, possibly visualize the provenance journey of individual collection objects
Timeline
focus on giving context to chronological aspect of the dataset
data points will be positioned on a timeline offering a virtual time journey, possibly offer additional information on significant events and incidents on the timeline
Exploration Space
focus on understanding correlations between different attributes of the dataset
dimensions assigned to the axes can be changed in real time affecting the positioning of data points, possibly use other visual variables (e.g. size, colour, shape, transparency) to visualize additional attributes
While the proposed scenarios offer three different access approaches that serve as a starting points, they all aim to encourage users to launch on an exploration journey into the given data set. All approaches are specifically concerned with the presentation of the data overview. Following Shneiderman’s principles proposed in the Visual Information Seeking Mantra “overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand” [1] all scenarios should additionally offer some kind of filtering mechanism as well as detail views for the individual data points.
Also interaction and navigation concepts need to be further examined and refined as well as design questions related to the issue of visualisation fidelity, which concerns all scenarios because the level of information for many attributes including the location of origin as well as creation date are not very precise in the given data set. In particular for the last scenario this will be a major challenge.
Over an iterative evolution process interactive prototypes will be developed that will also enable the testing of the usability and effectiveness.
[1] Shneiderman, Ben (1996): “The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations”. Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages.