PRISM :: Browsing by Author "Willett, Wesley"

Browsing by Author "Willett, Wesley"

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Open Access
3D Design Review Systems in Immersive Environments
(2023-09-21) Addam, Omar Khodr; Maurer, Frank O; Willett, Wesley; Jacob, Christian J; El-Hacha, Raafat; Irani, Pourang Polad
Design reviews play a crucial role in the development process, ensuring the quality and effectiveness of designs in various industries. However, traditional design review methods face challenges in effectively understanding and communicating complex 3D models. Immersive technologies, particularly Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), offer new opportunities to enhance the design review process. In this thesis, we investigate using immersive environments, specifically HMDs, for 3D design reviews. We begin with a systematic literature review to understand the current state of employing HMDs in industry for design reviews. As part of this review, we utilize a detailed taxonomy from the literature to categorize and analyze existing approaches. Additionally, we present four iterations of an immersive design review system developed during my industry experience. Two of these iterations are evaluated through case studies involving domain experts, including engineers, designers, and clients. A formal semi-structured focus group is conducted to gain further insights into traditional design review practices. The outcomes of these evaluations and the focus group discussions are thoroughly discussed. Based on the literature review and the focus group findings, we uncover a new challenge associated with using HMDs in immersive design reviews—asynchronous and remote collaboration. Unlike traditional design reviews, where participants view the same section on a shared screen, HMDs allow independent exploration of areas of interest, leading to a shift from synchronous to asynchronous communication. Consequently, important feedback may be missed as the lead designer disconnects from the users' perspectives. To address this challenge, we collaborate with a domain expert to develop a prototype that utilizes heatmap visualization to display 3D gaze data distribution. This prototype enables lead designers to quickly identify areas of review and missed regions. The study incorporates the Design Critique approach and provides valuable insights into different heatmap visualization variants (top view projection, object-based, and volume-based). Furthermore, a list of well-defined requirements is outlined for future spatio-temporal visualization applications aimed at integrating into existing workflows. Overall, this thesis contributes to the understanding and improvement of immersive design review systems, particularly in the context of utilizing HMDs. It offers insights into the current state of employing HMDs for design reviews, utilizes a taxonomy from the literature to analyze existing approaches, highlights challenges associated with asynchronous collaboration, and proposes a prototype solution with heatmap visualization to address the identified challenge.
Open Access
An Autobiographical Reflection on Designing Visualizations for Personal Contexts
(2020-10-23) Aseniero, Bon Adriel; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Tang, Anthony; Willett, Wesley; Neustaedter, Carman; Liang, Hung-Ling (Steve); Vande Moere, Andrew
Understanding personally relevant data can help us reflect upon ourselves or learn something new. Research in information visualization has shown that the use of interactive, graphical representations of data (data visualizations) enhance our ability to process information and learn. However, most of our current understanding of designing these representations stem from task-oriented professional/work contexts. In contrast, recently, the Infovis community has been interested in designing visualizations for more personal contexts. This knowledge can be applied to emergent research on data visualization usage in broader perspectives such as casual and personal visualizations, and visualizations for public engagement, where end-users tend to be non-experts, and where aesthetics and engagement may take precedence over task efficiency. In this thesis, I take an autobiographical approach in which I analyzed eight years’ worth of archived data (through design journals) on my work in designing and implementing data visualizations. These visualizations’ use cases range from individuals logging their activities, to several people (both novices and experts) convening in public engagement settings. Central to my body of work is an emphasis on the intentional use of visual aesthetics in designing data representations. Reflecting upon this body of work and experiences, I give a case-by-case, narrative reconstruction of my design process. In these narratives, I explore the prioritization of the aesthetic look-and-feel of visual encodings on the same level as people’s data exploration tasks. With this longitudinal insight, my thesis outlines a process of how a data visualization designer can design nonconventional data representations for personal contexts from sketches to working prototypes.
Open Access
Analyzing Twitter Data for Emergency Management
(2018-05-23) Marbouti, Mahshid; Maurer, Frank; Braun, John; Willett, Wesley; Far, Behrouz Homayoun; Costa Sousa, Mario
Social media is an important part of our lives. It is hard to ignore the role of social media in our everyday lives and during disastrous events. During emergencies, emergency personnel need to make strategic decisions in a short amount of time, coordinate actions and prioritize tasks. Social media can be a powerful source of information that comes directly from the public; it can reflect public sentiment, needs, and questions. In this research, I performed an interview study to find the use cases and challenges that emergency-related organizations encounter when dealing with social media. The findings reveal the needs of practitioners for designing social media monitoring tools to help them find the information they need. One of the main challenges for practitioners is that commercial tools are not designed for emergency response, and academic approaches do not consider their requirements. This dissertation brings insight into the design of expert-informed machine learning solutions for identifying relevant information from social media by following a human-centered design approach. By actively being involved with emergency practitioners throughout three years, I designed, developed, and evaluated a social media monitoring tool for emergency response. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of bringing analysts into the classification loop to train and get feedback to machine learning classifiers. It also shows that analysts would like to combine the training tasks with their response tasks. Another aspect of this research is exploring the significance of various categories of features and machine learning algorithms and automatically identifying situational awareness information in different emergency event datasets. Results show that significant features vary across different events which indicates that training should happen during the event.
Open Access
Better Little People Pictures: Generative Creation of Demographically Diverse Anthropographics
(ACM, 2024-05-11) Dhawka, Priya; Perera, Lauren; Willett, Wesley
We explore the potential of generative AI text-to-image models to help designers efficiently craft unique, representative, and demographically diverse anthropographics that visualize data about people. Currently, creating data-driven iconic images to represent individuals in a dataset often requires considerable design effort. Generative text-to-image models can streamline the process of creating these images, but risk perpetuating designer biases in addition to stereotypes latent in the models. In response, we outline a conceptual workflow for crafting anthropographic assets for visualizations, highlighting possible sources of risk and bias as well as opportunities for reflection and refinement by a human designer. Using an implementation of this workflow with Stable Diffusion and Google Colab, we illustrate a variety of new anthropographic designs that showcase the visual expressiveness and scalability of these generative approaches. Based on our experiments, we also identify challenges and research opportunities for new AI-enabled anthropographic visualization tools.
Open Access
(Big) data in urban design practice: supporting high-level design tasks using a visualization of human movement data from smartphones
(2021-02-24) Rout, Angela; Willett, Wesley
We present the SmartCampus visualization tool, representing spatiotemporal data of over 200 student pathways and restpoints on a university campus. Based on our experiences with SmartCampus, we also propose a task-based framework that de-scribes how practicing urban designers (specifically, architects) can use human movement data visualizations in their work. Although extensive amounts of location data are produced daily by smartphones, existing geospatial tools are not customized to specifically support high-level urban design tasks. To help identify opportunities in urban design for visualizing human movement data from devices such as smartphones, we used our SmartCampus prototype to facilitate a series of 3 participatory design sessions (3 participants), a targeted online survey (14 participants), and semi-structured interviews (6 participants) with architectural experts. Our findings showcase the need for location analysis tools tailored to concrete urban design practices, and also highlight opportunities for Smart City researchers interested in developing domain specific, visualization tools.
Open Access
Building with Data: Bridging Architectural Design Practices and Information Visualization
(2022-01-28) Hull, Carmen; Willett, Wesley; Hushlak, Gerald; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Ens, Barrett; Bejat, Laleh; Keefe, Daniel
Our work seeks to augment new information visualization research with strategies and workflows from the fields of design and architecture. To this end, this research explores how to adopt tools and methods that can integrate the best of physical and digital modalities to multiple contexts and scales in HCI and data visualization. Designing information visualization systems creates a need for a design approach that addresses and ties together two main threads – 1) how we as humans interact with and make sense of our environment and 2) how we as designers create meaning through geometry, form, and material encodings. While the research community within data visualization has primarily focused on screen-based data visualizations, there is now an opportunity to study how we can create insight with hybrid physical and digital representations of data through the lens of architectural practice. My colleagues and I have conducted this research at the intersection of model building, diagrams, and generative design, applying this knowledge to the design of multifaceted digital environments, from micro to macro scale, in two- and three- dimensional worlds. To develop this research, we first observe and characterize the architectural methods of model making and their potential to facilitate the design process of interactive systems. Next, we describe how physical hand-crafted and digitally fabricated models of different types assist in various stages of the design process. To illustrate how model building could support fluid exploration of multiple data sets, we built a 3D interactive campus model visualizing multiple layers of building-specific data. The system uses physical models as tangible tokens on an interactive touch surface, visualizing energy use and weather data daily over a two-year period. As an extension of our design, we developed a conceptual framework from this project to highlight the potential of physical models for supporting embodied exploration of spatial and non-spatial visualizations through fluid interaction. We then examine the use of diagrams in architecture and develop a conceptual framework based on the concept of data tectonics to organize and structure the design process of physical and immersive data systems. To further study the use of diagrams and generative design for data visualization, I collaborated with researchers at Tableau Software to develop a patented Tableau extension that self-generates and evolves up to thirty different design permutations at a time. The system randomly assigns a pre-specified palette of mark types to a chosen dataset giving designers the option of adding or deleting options that they deem promising. As a final project for this research, we brought the three principles of model making, diagramming, and generative design together to create a large-scale physical and immersive data visualization. In collaboration with the Department of Social Work at the University of Calgary, the project uses diagrams and generative design to prototype a series of three-dimensional encodings visualizing Global Gender Gap statistics from the World Economic Forum. The tent-like forms evoke sheltering structures that can be registered, experienced, and measured with the whole body. For this project, we applied the diagrammatic approach used in parametric design to traditional information visualization design principles and identified workflows that support rapid exploration and fabrication of multiple data design alternatives. There is no doubt that data and digital technologies, including machine learning and AI, will be part of our human fabric in the future, but what that looks like and how it is structured is still up to us. We need artists, and more diversity in general, in order to do this to the best of our potential as humans. In determining which practices encourage the creation of rich data-driven environments, this research underscores the fundamental need of humans to make sense of the world, inspiring designers to develop new spatial constructs that integrate both the art and science of the built environment.
Open Access
Demographically Diverse Anthropographics: Exploring Equitable Visual Representations of Diversity
(2023-07) Dhawka, Priyadarshinee; Willett, Wesley; Wu, Leanne; Messier, Geoffrey; Henry, Ryan
In this thesis, we explore the design of demographically diverse anthropographics from demographic data. Anthropographics are visualizations that often use generic human-shaped symbols as abstract representations of humans. These visualizations are frequently used to convey the human importance of data related to people’s experiences, usually focusing on demographic data such as age, gender, race among others. However, most current anthropographics employ generic human shapes to represent data about distinct demographic groups, which can hide important demographic and physical differences between these groups. The use of generic human shapes in current anthropographics highlights the lack of inclusive approaches for representing human physical diversity in data visualizations. In response,we explore the creation of demographically diverse anthropographics that communicate the visible physical diversity of demographically-distinct populations. Our contributions stem from a set of critical design explorations for visualizing demographic data with a focus on representing human physical diversity and a study exploring how viewers perceive visual representations of diversity in anthropographics. We make three contributions in this work. First, we describe critical design explorations from two prototypes for representing racial demographic data as physical characteristics of diversity (such as skin tones) in diverse anthropographics. Second, we explore how viewers may perceive visual representations of demographic diversity in anthropographics through an interview study on contemporary examples of homogeneous anthropographics from popular news media and our own set of diverse anthropographics. Finally, we identify a set of social and technical challenges in the creation of anthropographics and contribute a collection of forward-looking opportunities for advancing this line of research on equitable visual representations of diversity through demographically diverse anthropographics.
Open Access
Designing and Evaluating a Lightweight Video Player for Language Learning
(2017) Hu, Sathaporn; Willett, Wesley; Alim, Usman; Chilana, Parmit
Watching foreign language videos is a popular and convenient strategy used by many people for learning a new language. However, traditional video players, such as the YouTube player, are not designed to support language learning. We created two video players to explore and to address the issues of using traditional players as a language learning tool. Our players specifically target casual language learners. After evaluating the first player, we found that a traditional player makes it difficult for learners to (1) adjust the level of difficulty, (2) recover missed information, and (3) assess learning progress. We then created the second player to address these issues. The results of the evaluation of the second player demonstrate that people found the player to be helpful for language learning. We also found common usage patterns in the results and opportunities for future improvement.
Open Access
Designing Remote Collaboration Technologies for Wilderness Search and Rescue
(2021-06-28) Jones, Brennan David Gorham; Tang, Anthony; Neustaedter, Carman; Sharlin, Ehud; Willett, Wesley; Suzuki, Ryo; Semaan, Bryan
Wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) is the search for and extraction of one or more lost people (e.g., hikers, skiers) from a wilderness area. WSAR is time-critical, and even with current technologies, workers still face challenges in effective remote collaboration, information sharing, and awareness. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to understand how user interfaces can be designed to better support WSAR distributed collaboration. I approach this first by understanding how WSAR workers collaborate remotely using today's technologies. In the first phase of my research, I ran an investigative study in which I interviewed WSAR workers and observed a mock WSAR response. My findings demonstrate that the main goal of a system for WSAR distributed collaboration should be to help workers construct and maintain a shared mental model, but there are unique challenges to doing this when scattered and moving around the wilderness. Following this, I designed a prototype of a system for WSAR commanders. This system aims to provide commanders with more implicit awareness of events in the field and the experiences of field teams. It does this through (1) body cameras worn by field teams, streaming photos periodically to the command post; and (2) aggregating existing information channels together into one interface, allowing commanders to explore this information together as part of a bigger picture. I then evaluated this system through a remote user study. I found that the awareness provided by body-camera footage could give commanders additional confidence and comfort while reducing the need for explicit communications with field teams. However, it could also shift the burden of responsibility toward commanders. Overall, this work contributes the following: (1) an understanding of WSAR remote collaboration practices; (2) the design of an interface for providing commanders awareness of events in the field; (3) a method for studying WSAR user-interface technologies remotely through simulated scenarios; and (4) an understanding of the potential opportunities and challenges of new information streams and communication modalities in WSAR. Beyond WSAR, this work contributes more broadly to our understanding of how to design remote collaboration technologies for serious team-based activities in large outdoor environments.
Open Access
Evaluating the Performance of Virtual Reality Navigation Techniques for Large Environments
(Springer Nature Switzerland, 2019-01) Danyluk, Kurtis; Willett, Wesley
We present results from two studies comparing the performance of four different navigation techniques (flight, teleportation, world-in-miniature, and 3D cone-drag) and their combinations in large virtual reality map environments. While prior work has individually examined each of these techniques in other settings, our study presents the first direct comparison between them in large open environments, as well as one of the first comparisons in the context of current-generation virtual reality hardware. Our first study compared common techniques (flight, teleportation, and world-in-miniature) for search and navigation tasks. A follow-up study compared these techniques against 3D cone drag, a direct-manipulation navigation technique used in contemporary tools like Google Earth VR. Our results show the strength of flight as a stand-alone navigation technique, but also highlight five specific ways in which viewers can combine teleportation, world-in-miniature, and 3D cone drag with flight, drawing on the relative strengths of each technique to compensate for the weaknesses of others.
Open Access
EvoIsland: Interactive Evolution via an Island-Inspired Spatial User Interface Framework
(2022-04-14) Ivanov, Alexander; Willett, Wesley; Jacob, Christian
We present EvoIsland, a scalable interactive evolutionary user interface framework inspired by the spatially isolated land masses seen on Earth. Our generalizable interaction system encourages creators to spatially explore a wide range of design possibilities through the combination, separation, and rearrangement of hexagonal tiles on a grid. As these tiles are grouped into island-like clusters, localized populations of designs form through an underlying evolutionary system. The interactions that take place within EvoIsland provide content creators with new ways to shape, display and assess populations in evolutionary systems that produce a wide range of solutions with visual phenotype outputs.
Open Access
Examining the Utility of Constructing Physical Representations of Data
(2017) Payne, Jennifer; Willett, Wesley; Johnson, Jason; Sharlin, Ehud; Wylant, Barry
For millennia, people have constructed physicalizations---physical representations of information---by hand. Recent studies have shown that physicalizations can be more efficient for transmitting information than on-screen visualizations. In addition, innovations like shape-changing interfaces and digital fabrication now make it possible to create physicalizations with little manual effort. Yet many physicalizations are still constructed by hand. In this thesis, we explore how manual construction of physicalizations influences the way people approach and comprehend data, through two studies. One study compares bar chart authoring through physical construction to authoring using template-based chart creation software. A second study compares participant behaviour when constructing physicalizations to that when exploring previously-built physicalizations. Through comparison of these processes, we derive implications for the design of visualization authoring tools, and for the exploration of data.
Open Access
Exploration & Anthropomorphism in Immersive Unit Visualizations
(ACM: Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018-04-20) Ivanov, Alexander; Danyluk, Kurtis Thorvald; Willett, Wesley
We report on an initial examination of the potential of immersive unit visualizations in virtual reality, showing how these visualizations can help viewers examine data at multiple scales and support affective, personal experiences with data. We outline unique opportunities for unit visualizations in virtual reality, including support for (1) dynamic scale transitions, (2) immersive exploration, and (3) anthropomorphic interactions. We then demonstrate a prototype system and discuss the potential for virtual reality visualization to support personal interactions with data.
Open Access
Exploration Strategies for Discovery of Interactivity in Visualizations
(IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2018-02-05) Blascheck, Tanja; MacDonald Vermeulen, Lindsay; Vermeulen, Jo; Perin, Charles; Willett, Wesley; Ertl, Thomas; Carpendale, Sheelagh
We investigate how people discover the functionality of an interactive visualization that was designed for the general public. While interactive visualizations are increasingly available for public use, we still know little about how the general public discovers what they can do with these visualizations and what interactions are available. Developing a better understanding of this discovery process can help inform the design of visualizations for the general public, which in turn can help make data more accessible. To unpack this problem, we conducted a lab study in which participants were free to use their own methods to discover the functionality of a connected set of interactive visualizations of public energy data. We collected eye movement data and interaction logs as well as video and audio recordings. By analyzing this combined data, we extract exploration strategies that the participants employed to discover the functionality in these interactive visualizations. These exploration strategies illuminate possible design directions for improving the discoverability of a visualization’s functionality.
Open Access
FlavourFrame: Visualizing Tasting Experiences
(ACM UIST Posters, 2023-10-29) Anderson, Lauryn; Oehlberg, Lora; Willett, Wesley
We present FlavourFrame, a canvas-based app that helps tasters capture and visualize their perceptions during mindful tasting experiences. Taste perceptions are difficult to document because they are subjective, multisensory, and ephemeral; and everyday people have limited dedicated vocabulary to describe such experiences. Our customizable tool is designed to help novice and experienced tasters structure and record tasting experiences. FlavourFrame superimposes visual and text layers to personalize visual and word- based expression of flavour experience. Through autoethnographic reflections, we generated sample data and identified strengths and limitations of the prototype.
Open Access
FluencyAR: Augmented Reality Language Immersion
(ACM UIST Posters, 2023-10-27) Hollingworth, Shanna Li Ching; Willett, Wesley
FluencyAR is an augmented reality second language learning tool centered around the concepts of language immersion and self-talk. For many second language learners, advancing into upper levels of fluency can be difficult without sufficient opportunities to practice. Traditional solutions of tutoring or finding exchange partners are often inconvenient or limiting. FluencyAR provides situational conversation practice in highly self-directed practice sessions that imitate environments where the target language is dominant. We utilize augmented reality to allow users to practice their target language with immediate feedback at any time, and from any location. Using ChatGPT and the physical space of the user, we can produce unique and challenging conversation prompts relative to a user’s surroundings, ensuring that sessions remain interesting.
Open Access
Grand Challenges in Immersive Analytics
(ACM : New York, New York, 2021-05-08) Ens, Barrett; Bach, Benjamin; Cordeil, Maxime; Engelke, Ulrich; Serrano, Marcos; Willett, Wesley; Prouzeau, Arnaud; Anthes, Christoph; Büschel, Wolfgang; Dunne, Cody; Dwyer, Tim; Grubert, Jens; Haga, Jason H.; Kirschenbaum, Nurit; Kobayashi, Dylan; Lin, Tica; Olaosebikan, Monsurat; Pointecker, Fabian; Saffo, David; Saquib, Nazmus; Schmalsteig, Dieter; Szafir, Danielle Albers; Whitlock, Matthew; Yang, Yalong
Immersive Analytics is a quickly evolving field that unites several areas such as visualisation, immersive environments, and human-computer interaction to support human data analysis with emerging technologies. This research has thrived over the past years with multiple workshops, seminars, and a growing body of publications, spanning several conferences. Given the rapid advancement of interaction technologies and novel application domains, this paper aims toward a broader research agenda to enable widespread adoption. We present 17 key research challenges developed over multiple sessions by a diverse group of 24 international experts, initiated from a virtual scientific workshop at ACM CHI 2020. These challenges aim to coordinate future work by providing a systematic roadmap of current directions and impending hurdles to facilitate productive and effective applications for Immersive Analytics.
Open Access
I Do Not Completely Trust Your Data - Towards Visualization Lexicons for Ambiguous and Incomplete Data
(IEEE Vis 2024 Poster Track, 2024-10-15) Ross, Karly; Willett, Wesley
We present two challenges associated with our current work on a visual lexicon that expresses data absences and ambiguities. First, most visualization approaches fail to express the potential ambiguity and incompleteness in the data they represent. This can pose a fundamental sense-making and communication challenge in contexts (like community organizing), where official data sources and local knowledge may have little overlap or even disagree. Second, indicating expectations, ambiguity, or contradiction between community and administrative data is likely to increase visualization complexity. This increased complexity poses challenges for accessibility and engagement. We outline our work to create a visual lexicon and address the interactions between these challenges.
Open Access
I/O Bits: User-Driven, Situated, and Dedicated Self-Tracking
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2021-06-28) Wannamaker, Kendra; Kollannur, Sandeep; Dörk, Marian; Willett, Wesley
We present I/O Bits, a prototype personal informatics system that explores the potential for user-driven and situated self-tracking. With simple tactile inputs and small e-paper visualizations, I/O Bits are dedicated physical devices that allow individuals to track and visualize different kinds of personal activities in-situ. This is in contrast to most self-tracking systems, which automate data collection, centralize information displays, or integrate into multi-purpose devices like smartwatches or mobile phones. We report findings from an e-paper visualization workshop and a prototype deployment where participants constructed their own I/O Bits and used them to track a range of personal data. Based on these experiences, we contribute insights and opportunities for situated and user-driven personal informatics.
Open Access
Information Visualization for Exploration and Self-Reflection in Social Media
(2021-06) Lapides, Paul; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Isenberg, Petra; Willett, Wesley; Boulanger, Pierre; Katz, Larry; Aycock, John
The emergence of global social media platforms in the last decade has changed how people communicate and inform themselves. Today, people use social media during work and leisure time to send messages, browse current events, and keep up with friends and family both near and far. Virtually every platform uses reverse chronological lists to prioritize and deliver content throughout the network. This presentation modality implicitly puts the viewer's focus on the present moment, on the newest content available. Lists may be effective for the purposes of real-time content viewing but other representations are better suited to see our social media activity in aggregate and to focus the viewer's attention on the past. This dissertation investigates the potential of information visualization to show people their social media data to gain awareness about their online social history. Unlike many visualizations for social media that use graph representations and focus on the structure of the network, our approach focuses on showing the broad temporal characteristics of personal social media activity. We present design studies that focus on three different parts of a social media platform, specifically Facebook: the news feed, the personal profile, and private messages. In our first study, participants were observed while they browsed their news feed and were interviewed in situ about their reactions and opinions. Next, we present Friend Bubbles, an interactive visualization that shows the connections between friends and posted content on the personal profile. Finally, we present TextVis, an online survey tool that asks participants to explore their instant message history with a large-scale temporal visualization. This dissertation ends with reflections about how social media and computer interfaces may influence people's attention and awareness, and how information visualization can be used to support exploration and deeper knowledge about personal social media experiences.