a study on glyph-based visualisation with dense visual context

Department of Engineering Science & Oxford e-Research Centre

A Study on Glyph-based

Visualisation with Dense

Visual Context

Saiful Khan, Karl J. Proctor, Simon Walton, Rene

Bañares-Alcántara, and Min Chen

CGVC 10-11 September 2014, Leeds, UK


Motivation

•Government Soft Landings (GSL) policy proposed by UK cabinet on 2011.

Site Acquisition

Planning

Design

ProcurementConstruction

Management

Facility Management

Decommission

BIM

Client

Architect

Engineers

Contractor

Sub-contractor

BIM Operator


Challenge


Solution: RDBMS


Problem: RDBMS

Amount of resources?


Solution: Search


Challenge

• Search quality

• List or tabular view


Information Visualisation

Solution


Multi-attribute based Document Search


Search Interface

Crawler AgentsQuery Processor

History CacheOntology

Visualization

23

1

5

Crawler Manager

1 2 3 4Expand query Update history Search in cache

1

Receive query

3

2

1 Fetch History 2 Crawl File Systems 3 Update Cache

Dis

trib

ute

d F

ile S

yste

m

4

5 Update result

7

6

6 7Relevance feedback Train ontologies

BIM Document Search Engine


Search Result Visualisation (Dots)


Search Result Visualisation (Glyphs)


Problem

• Static dots vs. animated dots

• Static dots vs. static glyphs

• Static glyphs vs. animated glyphs

• Animated dots vs. animated glyphs


Related Work

• Treemap [Shneiderman, 1991]

• Pixel-based visualization [Keim, 2000; Oelke, 2011]

• Glyph placing strategies and visual encoding [Ward, 2001, 2008]

• Web search result visualization [xFind, 2001; Hoeber & Xue, 2006]

• Glyph-based web search results visualization [Roberts et al., 2002;Chau, 2011]

• Animation in motion coding for patterns [Ware & Bobrow, 2006]


File System Glyph


• Motivation: Occlusion

• Potential problem: Perceptual difficulty in animation

• Proposed Solution: Transfer function

• Optimisation: Empirical studies

Cyclically-Animated Glyph


Transfer Functions

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

Gro

up

1G

ro

up

2G

ro

up

3

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 10

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

0

1

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1


Empirical Studies


Results: Focus & Context

Exp.1 Context Information Exp.2 Focus Information


Results: JND


Problem

• Static dots vs. animated dots

• Static dots vs. static glyphs

• Static glyphs vs. animated glyphs

• Animated dots vs. animated glyphs


Static Dots vs. Animated Dots

80%

10%

10%

Preference

Animated Static Undecided

40%

60%

Annoying: Animated Dots

Yes No


Static Dots vs. Static Glyphs

30%40%

70%60%

Learning Memorising

Difficulty

Easy Difficult

90%

10%

Willingness to Learn

Yes No

60%

40%

Preference

Glyphs Dots


Static Glyphs vs. Animated Glyphs

80%

20%

Annoying: Animated Glyphs

Yes No

60%70%

40%30%

Search Results

Fi le Attributes

Difficulty

Easy Difficult

20%

20%

60%

Preference

Animated Static No preference


Animated Dots vs. Animated Glyphs

50%

40%

10%

Preference

Dots Glyphs Undecided


Summary

Animated Dots

Static Glyphs Animated Glyphs

Static Dots


• Participants learned the visual encoding quickly.

• Suggested various glyph design options.

• Suggestions are included in the revised design.

• Participants found the proposed visualisation is useful:

– Quickly interpreting the search results and their location.

– Easier to navigate through file system hierarchies.

Discussion


Thank you.

a study on glyph-based visualisation with dense visual context

Engineering

animated dotsstatic

animated glyphsanimated

static glyphs static

glyphbased visualisation

static glyphsdepartment

context information

pixelbased visualization

focus contextexp