In this
presentation I will go through five key points of our paper.
Let's first talk about a brief historical context of situated visualization
Situated visualization is a concept that aims to enhance the analysis process by embedding
data visualizations into the physical objects of interest.
The early works in the field, such as Virtual Voucher and SiteLens by White and Feiner,
helped establish the foundations of situated visualization.
The concept of situated visualization has also been a source of inspiration for the
emergence of related fields, such as situated analytics, which was introduced by ElSayed
et al. in 2016.
In 2017, Willett et al introduced the concept of situated and embedded data representation.
They also introduced the term physical referent, which they define as the objects or spaces
to which the data refers.
At the time of writing our paper, the latest survey by Bressa et al. revealed a considerable
number of relevant papers and shed light on the current state of the field.
The concept of situatedness has long been linked with the idea of integrating visualization
with the physical world and its immediate surroundings.
However, in some cases, the physical referents may be replaced with proxies, such as scale
models or immersive virtual environments.
The use of proxies is often motivated by the fact that the referents may be too distant
or dangerous to visit, or they may be too large or small to be observed directly
The idea of using a proxy to represent a physical referent is not entirely new.
In their paper, Willett et al describe the possibility of using a facsimile to represent
the original physical referent.
Prozeau refers to the VR version of situated visualization as a proxy for authoring AR
applications.
Mathis et al mention the opportunities of using XR as a "proxy for real-world research".
However, a situated visualization model that can explicitly describe these proxies had
not been thoroughly pursued.
In the slides, we will go through the transition from the existing model to our proposed model
of proxsituated visualization.
Our paper categorizes the current models into three distinct groups.
We extended the model by Willett et al, which has been widely cited in the field.
This is the redrawn version of the model.
We use industrial machines in a shop floor as an illustration as our research is funded
by an industry partner.
The raw data is associated with the physical referent.
Visualization turns this data into data representation through a visualization pipeline.
There are two worlds in this model: the logical world and the physical world.
How can we transition from this model to a model that can describe proxies for physical
referents?
To make the transition easier to follow, I am going to hide the relationships.
The first key point that we would like to highlight is that
Going back to the shop floor scenario, let's suppose that the chart is embedded in a machine
and the user views it through an AR headset.
The chart represents the data related to the machine, making the machine the physical referent.
However, we also observe that the user, referent, and data representation are all situated in
a shop floor environment with specific characteristics such as noise, temperature, and even social
interaction.
To incorporate the environment, we introduce a new entity called environment
Of course, there are cases where the environment itself serves as the physical referent, such
as in the case of SiteLens.
However, we argue that the distinction between the two offers greater flexibility and is
also useful in describing proxsituated visualization.
The second key point, which is the main focus of our paper and has been previously mentioned,
is the concept of proxy.
We recognize that the immediate physical referent (as shown in the left figure) can be represented
in many ways using proxy representations.
Examples of such proxies include 3D models on a desktop, tangible scale models, virtual
environments, or even a combination of immersive microscopic views and tangible models, among
many others.
Now we know that we can have physical referent proxy entity
Similarly, environment can also have proxy
We refer to the world in which proxies are located as proxy world.
We also acknowledge that data representation is not limited to the physical world.
Charts can be embedded in tangible models or virtual models.
Therefore, we need to further refine the model.
I am going to hide the data representation and make the boundary of the physical world
smaller
Move the proxy world to the right side of physical world
Make the drawing smaller to make a space for
a transitional world between physical world and proxy world
where we want to position the data presentation entity.
This is the extended model that we propose.
Of course, it is possible to further expand this model, but we have endeavored to keep
it as simple as possible without sacrificing the ability to describe proxy representations.
To make it more informative, we can highlight the existing entities, represented as dotted
boxes.
Bring back existing relationships.
And show new relationships we introduced.
This figure depicts the complete model that we presented in our paper.
We can observe that there are a considerable number of relationships shown here.
The question arises as to how we can describe these relationships.
For instance, how can we transform a physical referent into a physical referent proxy?
Willett et al have proposed two ways to describe relationships in their model.
These are spatial indirection and temporal indirection.
The spatial indirection is spatial offset between two entitles.
Objects that are far from each other has high spatial offset, and thus, high spatial indirection.
Similarly, the temporal indirection is the temporal offset between two entities.
We incorporated two more ways to describe the relationships.
They are representation scale and representation form.
Representation scale is a transformation in geometric scale or semantic scale.
Representation form is a transformation to digital or physical form.
From the new entities and relationships, we can create a multi-dimensional design space.
In our paper we provide an illustration of a subset of this space.
The next part of our paper describes a semi-systematic literature review we conducted to better understand
the state of proxsituated visualization.
Using the seed papers approach, we looked at 43 proxsituated visualizations from 39
papers.
We discovered a wide range of variations in spatial indirection, temporal indirection,
representation scales and form, that are coming from different domains and use cases.
In the following slides, I will briefly highlight several observations.
For instance, in terms of spatial indirection, we have found instances where the user can
observe both the immediate and proxy referents, as seen in the left figure.
In other cases, such as the one in the middle, the user might be in the immediate referent
but cannot observe it from the outside.
Yet other cases involve the placement of predictive physical referents, such as the design of
a new building in the immediate environment.
The paper also highlight examples of different types of temporal indirectness, such as synthesized,
historical, live and predictive.
And few interesting observations of different representation scales.
Here is a brief summary of some predominant cases.
We found a trend in replicating the spatial indirection between referent and environment,
such as situating digital models in an immersive environment or placing scale models on top
of a map.
The predominant cases for temporal indirection are the use of a proxy to represent historical
raw data, referent, and environment.
We found that downscaling a large referent and environment is an apparent trend, followed
by a similar share between real and interactive scales.
In terms of representation form, we found that digital representation is predominant,
followed by tangible, and a mix of digital and tangible.
In the paper, we also highlight potential future directions.
Please refer to our paper for more details.
In the future, the technology used to create proxy representations will be extremely advanced
such that immediate and proxsituatedness must be made distinguishable through technical
implementation rather than user perception.
This would mean that such an ultimate tool is not only capable of perfectly simulating
immediate situatedness but is also able to manipulate physical objects in various forms
and scales depending on the task’s requirements.
The question is