Tim Dwyer

Monash University (Australia) · Caulfield School of Information Technology

Myriad systems have been proposed in recent years involving situated visualization with tangible scale models as proxies for physical referents. Most of these focus on static placements of scale models that mimic their real-world arrangement. While such static placement is useful to show the spatial context of referents, it does not take full advan...

We present Deimos, a grammar for specifying dynamic embodied immersive visualisation morphs and transitions. A morph is a collection of animated transitions that are dynamically applied to immersive visualisations at runtime and is conceptually modelled as a state machine. It is comprised of state, transition, and signal specifications. States in a...

Recent studies have explored how users of immersive visualisation systems arrange data representations in the space around them. Generally, these have focused on placement centred at eye-level in absolute room coordinates. However, work in HCI exploring full-body interaction has identified zones relative to the user's body with different roles. We...

Existing situated visualization models assume the user is able to directly interact with the objects and spaces to which the data refers (known as physical referents). We review a growing body of work exploring scenarios where the user interacts with a proxy representation of the physical referent rather than immediately with the object itself. Thi...

In immersive environments, positioning data visualisations around the user in a wraparound layout has been advocated as advantageous over flat arrangements more typical of traditional screens. However, other than limiting the distance users must walk, there is no clear design rationale behind this common practice, and little research on the impact...

When collaborating face-to-face, people commonly use the surfaces and spaces around them to perform sensemaking tasks, such as spatially organising documents, notes or images. However, when people collaborate remotely using desktop interfaces they no longer feel like they are sharing the same space. This limitation may be overcome through collabora...

When collaborating face-to-face, people commonly use the surfaces and spaces around them to perform sensemaking tasks, such as spatially organising documents, notes or images. However, when people collaborate remotely using desktop interfaces they no longer feel like they are sharing the same space. This limitation may be overcome through collabora...

Immersive environments offer new possibilities for exploring three-dimensional volumetric or abstract data. However, typical mid-air interaction offers little guidance to the user in interacting with the resulting visuals. Previous work has explored the use of haptic controls to give users tangible affordances for interacting with the data, but the...

User trust plays a key role in determining whether autonomous computer applications are relied upon. It will play a key role in the acceptance of emerging AI applications such as optimisation. Two important factors known to affect trust are system transparency, i.e. how well the user understands how the system works, and system performance. However...

Head-mounted augmented reality (AR) displays allow for the seamless integration of virtual visualisation with contextual tangible references, such as physical (tangible) globes. We explore the design of immersive geospatial data visualisation with AR and tangible globes. We investigate the “tangible-virtual interplay” of tangible globes with virtua...

As mixed-reality (MR) technologies become more mainstream, the delineation between data visualisations displayed on screens or other surfaces and those foating in space becomes increasingly blurred. Rather than the choice of using either a 2D surface or the 3D space for visualising data being a dichotomy, we argue that users should have the freedom...

Immersive Analytics is now a fully emerged research topic that spans several research communities, including Human-Computer Interaction, Data Visualisation, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Immersive Analytics research has identified and validated benefits of using embodied, 3D spatial immersive environments for visualisation and have shown b...

This study analyzed and explored the cognitive load of Australian energy market operators managing one of the longest inter-connected electrical networks in the world. Each operator uses a workstation with seven screens in an active control room environment, with a large coordination screen to show information and enable collaboration between diffe...

Eye tracking is growing in popularity for multiple application areas, yet analysing and exploring the large volume of complex data remains difficult for most users. We present a comprehensive eye tracking visual analytics system to enable the exploration and presentation of eye-tracking data across time and space in an efficient manner. The applica...

There are many methods for projecting spherical maps onto the plane. Interactive versions of these projections allow the user to centre the region of interest. However, the effects of such interaction have not previously been evaluated. In a study with 120 participants we find interaction provides significantly more accurate area, direction and dis...

This chapter surveys the space of three-dimensional (3D) mobile visualizations, that is, 3D abstract or spatial data on mobile 2D displays or 3D immersive displays. As a playful “case study” a scenario from the film Aliens is used, where the marines are overrun by aliens in the ceiling, as their mobile visualization device fails to show them the he...

Tangible controls-especially sliders and rotary knobs-have been explored in a wide range of interactive applications for desktop and immersive environments. Studies have shown that they support greater precision and provide proprioceptive benefits, such as support for eyes-free interaction. However, such controls tend to be expressly designed for s...

In this paper, we report on a study of visual representations for cyclical data and the effect of interactively wrapping a bar chart 'around its boundaries'. Compared to linear bar chart, polar (or radial) visualisations have the advantage that cyclical data can be presented continuously without mentally bridging the visual 'cut' across the left-an...

We explore network visualisation on a two-dimensional torus topology that continuously wraps when the viewport is panned. That is, links may be “wrapped” across the boundary, allowing additional spreading of node positions to reduce visual clutter. Recent work has investigated such pannable wrapped visualisations, finding them not worse than unwrap...

Immersive Analytics is a quickly evolving field that unites several areas such as visualisation, immersive environments, and human-computer interaction to support human data analysis with emerging technologies. This research has thrived over the past years with multiple workshops, seminars, and a growing body of publications, spanning several confe...

We argue that visualization research has overwhelmingly focused on users from the economically developed world. However, billions of people around the world are rapidly emerging as new users of information technology. Most of the next billion users of visualization technologies will come from parts of the world that are extremely populous but histo...

We explore network visualisation on a two-dimensional torus topology that continuously wraps when the viewport is panned. That is, links may be “wrapped” across the boundary, allowing additional spreading of node positions to reduce visual clutter. Recent work has investigated such pannable wrapped visualisations, finding them not worse than unwrap...

Node-link diagrams are widely used to visualise networks. However, even the best network layout algorithms ultimately result in ’hairball’ visualisations when the graph reaches a certain degree of complexity, requiring simplification through aggregation or interaction (such as filtering) to remain usable. Until now, there has been little data to in...

This article reviews two decades of research in topics in Information Visualisation emerging from the Data Visualisation and Immersive Analytics Lab at Monash University Australia (Monash IA Lab). The lab has been influential with contributions in algorithms, interaction techniques and experimental results in Network Visualisation, Interactive Opti...

Collaborative visual analytics leverages social interaction to support data exploration and sensemaking. These processes are typically imagined as formalised, extended activities, between groups of dedicated experts, requiring expertise with sophisticated data analysis tools. However, there are many professional domains that benefit from support fo...

Efficient optimisation algorithms have become important tools for finding high-quality solutions to hard, real-world problems such as production scheduling, timetabling, or vehicle routing. These algorithms are typically “black boxes” that work on mathematical models of the problem to solve. However, many problems are difficult to fully specify, an...

A fundamental part of data visualization is transforming data to map abstract information onto visual attributes. While this abstraction is a powerful basis for data visualization, the connection between the representation and the original underlying data (i.e., what the quantities and measurements actually correspond with in reality) can be lost....

We contribute MobileVisFixer, a new method to make visualizations more mobile-friendly. Although mobile devices have become the primary means of accessing information on the web, many existing visualizations are not optimized for small screens and can lead to a frustrating user experience. Currently, practitioners and researchers have to engage in...

Abstract data has no natural scale and so interactive data visualizations must provide techniques to allow the user to choose their viewpoint and scale. Such techniques are well established in desktop visualization tools. The two most common techniques are zoom+pan and overview+detail. However, how best to enable the analyst to navigate and view ab...

Immersive technologies offer new opportunities to support collaborative visual data analysis by providing each collaborator a personal, high-resolution view of a flexible shared visualisation space through a head mounted display. However, most prior studies of collaborative immersive analytics have focused on how groups interact with surface interf...

Immersive technologies offer new opportunities to support collaborative visual data analysis by providing each collaborator a personal, high-resolution view of a flexible shared visualisation space through a head mounted display. However, most prior studies of collaborative immersive analytics have focused on how groups interact with surface interf...

data has no natural scale and so interactive data visualizations must provide techniques to allow the user to choose their viewpoint and scale. Such techniques are well established in desktop visualization tools. The two most common techniques are zoom+pan and overview+detail. However, how best to enable the analyst to navigate and view abstract da...

Node-link diagrams are widely used to visualise networks. However, even the best network layout algorithms ultimately result in 'hairball' visualisations when the graph reaches a certain degree of complexity, requiring simplification through aggregation or interaction (such as filtering) to remain usable. Until now, there has been little data to in...

We introduce Tilt Map, a novel interaction technique for intuitively transitioning between 2D and 3D map visualisations in immersive environments. Our focus is visualising data associated with areal features on maps, for example, population density by state. Tilt Map transitions from 2D choropleth maps to 3D prism maps to 2D bar charts to overcome...

Shared displays are well suited to public viewing and collaboration, however they lack personal space to view private information and act without disturbing others. Combining them with Augmented Reality (AR) headsets allows interaction without altering the context on the shared display. We study a set of such interaction techniques in the context o...

We investigate visualisations of networks on a 2-dimensional torus topology, like an opened-up and flattened doughnut. That is, the network is drawn on a rectangular area while “wrapping” specific links around the border. Previous work on torus drawings of networks has been mostly theoretical, limited to certain classes of networks, and not evaluat...

We explore the adaptation of 2D small-multiples visualisation on flat screens to 3D immersive spaces. We use a ”shelves” metaphor for layout of small multiples and consider a design space across a number of layout and interaction dimensions. We demonstrate the applicability of a prototype system informed by this design space to data sets from diffe...

Immersive Analytics is an emerging interdisciplinary research area that investigates the use of nontraditional display and input technology to immerse users in their data. A prominent aspect this research investigates is "immersive data visualization", which uses augmented and virtual reality technology to visually immerse users in their data to fa...

We present FIESTA, a prototype system for collaborative immersive analytics (CIA). In contrast to many existing CIA prototypes, FIESTA allows users to collaboratively work together wherever and however they wish---untethered from mandatory physical display devices. Users can freely move around in a shared room-sized environment, author and generate...

In immersive display environments, such as virtual or augmented reality, we can make explicit the connections between data points in visualisations and their context in the world, or in other visualisations. This paper considers the requirements and design space for drawing such links in order to minimise occlusion and clutter. A novel possibility...

Immersive analytics turns the very space surrounding the user into a canvas for data analysis, supporting human cognitive abilities in myriad ways. We present the results of a design study, contextual inquiry, and longitudinal evaluation involving professional economists using a Virtual Reality (VR) system for multidimensional visualization to expl...

This is an invitation to the research area of graph drawing. It encompasses basic research such as graph theory, complexity theory, data structures, and graph algorithms as well as applied research such as software libraries, implementations, and applications. Application domains include areas within computer science (e. g., information visualizati...

Immersive analytics turns the very space surrounding the user into a canvas for data analysis, supporting human cognitive abilities in myriad ways. We present the results of a design study, contextual inquiry, and longitudinal evaluation involving professional economists using a Virtual Reality (VR) system for multidimensional visualization to expl...

Immersive virtual- and augmented-reality headsets can overlay a flat image against any surface or hang virtual objects in the space around the user. The technology is rapidly improving and may, in the long term, replace traditional flat panel displays in many situations. When displays are no longer intrinsically flat, how should we use the space ar...

This paper explores different ways to render world-wide geographic maps in virtual reality (VR). We compare: (a) a 3D exocentric globe, where the user's viewpoint is outside the globe; (b) a flat map (rendered to a plane in VR); (c) an egocentric 3D globe, with the viewpoint inside the globe; and (d) a curved map, created by projecting the map onto...

Showing flows of people and resources between multiple geographic locations is a challenging visualisation problem. We conducted two quantitative user studies to evaluate different visual representations for such dense many-to-many flows. In our first study we compared a bundled node-link flow map representation and OD Maps [37] with a new visualis...