hello I want to talk about our paper Perceptual Pat: A Virtual Human Visual System for Iterative Visualization Design.
This work is done in collaboration between this team at
the University of Maryland ,College Park and Dr Sanghyun Hong from Oregon State University.
Our work Perceptual Pat is motivated by Jack. What is Jack ?
Jack is a concept of a human simulation tool developed in 1993 by Dr Norman Badler
et al. at the University of Pennsylvania. Jack simulates human body and its movements it
mainly focuses on simulating physical human movements in a graphical manner. This enables
an evaluation of a product or a situation without having to test with real humans.
This technique has been widely used especially for ergonomical purposes to simulate how a product
would affect humans from various physical aspects. This concept of a human simulation tool
made us think... what if there was a virtual human like what Jack does, that simulates the human eye
and evaluates how the visualization design that we've created would be seen by others?
Of course, visualization is an iterative process that needs persistent editing and editing.
Even with a lot of changes, however, it is difficult for an individual designer to be sure of their
designs without feedback from others. So we hypothesized that the idea of a virtual human
visual system that provides feedback about how humans would view charts would help visualization
designers in developing and evaluating their work. For this reason we developed the Perceptual Pat.
Perceptual Pat is an implementation of a virtual human visual system to augment and
extend the capabilities of a human designer when creating visualizations. We implemented the tool
by combining a suit of perceptually inspired image filters. These filters are created using computer
vision and AI techniques. Together they combine to yield what a person would see in visualizations.
However, this doesn't mean that we're trying to replace humans. Our goal is just to generate
pragmatic and actionable feedback to support visualization design and evaluation. Here is how
Perceptual Pat works: First upload, Second analysis, Third save and compare. First, upload. Users need to
upload a visualization image to path Design Lab a web-based system for managing visualization design.
Second, analysis. Pat Design Lab provides analysis to the image. Users can look at the
analysis in a report form or superimpose filters on top of the original image.
Third, save and compare. Users can save past
versions of the analysis and compare their new versions with the old ones.
For evaluation, we conducted a longitudinal study with four visualization designers. We also
conducted interviews before and after the study to ask about the experience using Perceptual Pat.
Initially we let participants choose a data set or a visualization of their own
and upload them to Pat Design Lab. Then, we give them seven days to upload the updated
versions of their visualizations at least five times and at the same time provide reasons for
the changes made in each iteration. Now here's one example from our participant.
The image on the left is a participant's initial chart image before making changes.
The output you see at the center is the image that the participants uploaded in
her third iteration and we will call that stage three. In stage three, the vertical
grids are removed, the title is added and, the legend is placed above the charts.
In stage five, the colors of the line have changed
and a small icon is added to the lines that are incomplete.
If you're interested in knowing in more detail about how a Perceptual Pat help make changes to
the design. Please refer to our paper perceptual path or please attend a live presentation.
Here is another example. This figure is an image that we have added in our Perceptual Pat paper.
The figure shows the overview of how Perceptual Pat works. During revised and resubmit process,
one of the reviewers wanted us to change the design of our figure using the Perceptual Pat.
So we asked a graphic designer to improve this figure, and we specifically told her
to use Perceptual Pat to get feedback. The image that you see now is what used
to be our original version before the designer had made any changes.
Now the image you see on your right is the designer's output using Perceptual Pat.
If you want to find out more details about our work, please come to our presentation.
We're also very interested in hearing your opinions and thoughts about our work.
Our presentation takes place on Wednesday April the 26th at 11:10 local time, in session
Visualization Grammars and Design at room X11 + X12. We're looking forward to seeing you