Providing Location Awareness on Large Interactive Displays
Summary
Large interactive displays are increasingly being used for collaborative exploration and analysis of complex data. For example, in a police emergency response scenario, a group of police officers may use a large, interactive wall display to investigate ongoing incidents. In this scenario, imagine a group of officers standing in front of a wall display which shows a city map augmented with police car locations tracked through GPS. After an officer selects an incident on the overview map for the group to discuss the current situation, a zoomed view of the selected location pops up. Multiple incident locations can be opened at the same time to allow for group discussion and surveillance. The officer can see that three police vehicles have arrived at the scene. However, while they discuss the force allocations for the incident, one vehicle moves outside of the zoomed view of the map because it is pursuing a fleeing suspect. The icon for the vehicle disappears on the map, and this now poses a challenge for the officer to maintain awareness of both the incident and the disappearing vehicle.
In the scenario described above, the officers may also engage with other discussions or step away from the display to attend to other cases. Maintaining awareness of moving targets that have exited the zoomed map view is crucial to the officers’ situation awareness. This project seeks to address the issue of off-view moving targets through Canyon, an information visualization technique based on a paper-folding metaphor. We conducted a lab study to understand the effectiveness of the Canyon visualization and compare it to the top-performing technique from the literature. The results showed that Canyon allowed for higher accuracy in tracking the movement and estimating the location of the off-view targets while achieving similar task completion time. For more information, please see the publication below.
In the scenario described above, the officers may also engage with other discussions or step away from the display to attend to other cases. Maintaining awareness of moving targets that have exited the zoomed map view is crucial to the officers’ situation awareness. This project seeks to address the issue of off-view moving targets through Canyon, an information visualization technique based on a paper-folding metaphor. We conducted a lab study to understand the effectiveness of the Canyon visualization and compare it to the top-performing technique from the literature. The results showed that Canyon allowed for higher accuracy in tracking the movement and estimating the location of the off-view targets while achieving similar task completion time. For more information, please see the publication below.
My Roles
- Conducted literature review to survey existing work and brainstorm potential solutions
- Led a master student in the iterative design process, including ideation, prototyping, and user study
- Designed a lab study to evaluate the effectiveness of the Canyon technique
- Collaborated to conduct data analysis and publish the research findings
Collaborators
- Alexandra Ion - University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
- Michael Haller - University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
- Mark Hancock - University of Waterloo
- Stacey D. Scott - University of Waterloo
Publications & Presentations
- Ion, A., Chang, Y.-L.B., Haller, M., Hancock, M., Scott, S.D. (2013) Canyon: Providing Location Awareness of Multiple Moving Objects in a Detail View on Large Displays. Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp 3149-3158. **Best Paper Honourable Mention Award (awarded to less than 5% of 2000 submissions)**