Virtual environments for visualising information
For some applications, such as architectural CAD, its fairly obvious
how you would start to place them in a 3D VR environment. In other
cases there are fewer clues asto how information should be represented
in 3D. Financial systemsM, applications that deal with the structure of
knowledge, and interacting with databases are good examples, and cause
us to have to be more creative in designing our environments. We also have
to think harder about what aspects of data are best represented spatially,
and which map best onto other attributes such as colour, sound, texture,
movement or behaviour.
Here we see a financial application written by Loren Siebert for
his M.Sc. It represents different stocks by coloured icons. The shape of
each icon represents its stockmarket performance over the last 30 days.
Particular indicators can be mapped onto colour, height above the ground,
location on the ground plane, or can be graphed on the back walls. If something
interesting is currently happening to a particular stock it is made to vibrate thus
gaining your attention.
This model would let us see the performance of a portfolio of stocks at
a glance. The representation can be nested so that each icon represents the
overall performance of one portfolio and we can then see indications of
interesting activity in any of them.
Gary Ng is currently working
on different metaphors for visualising abstract information for his Ph.D.
One piece of work that has come from that is the Information Tree shown
opposite.
This is a way of representing the production performance of a public
utility. In this area analysts have inspect an enormous amount of new data
daily. To see details there is no substitute for looking at the raw
figures, but the difficult problem is to get an overall picture of what is going
on quickly. The tree is a way of mapping all the significant attributes of
the data so that both the overview can be readily seen, as well as
drawing attention to significant events. The metaphor was pushed quite a
long way, using green shoots for healthy activity, and yellows, or dead
brown wood for things that are "drying up". To indicate specific events,
parts of the tree are decorated by shaped baubles, making quite an attractive
Christmas Tree.
The current aim is to produce an "advanced interface" for the complex
medical knowledge modeling activities of the Galen project. The
challenge there is to represent the complex, and dynamically changing,
relationships between a complex web of knowledge in such a way as to make
it all readily comprehensible.
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