“Maxime Cordeil, Andrew Cunningham, Tim Dwyer, Bruce H. Thomas, and Kim Marriott. 2017. ImAxes: Immersive Axes as Embodied Affordances for Interactive Multivariate Data Visualisation. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology(UIST ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 71-83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3126594.3126613”
The authors propose a Virtual Reality environment where users can create, manipulate and interact with Information Visualisations. They use a formal grammar to describe the visualizations and axes orientations. This can allow users to visualize and directly manipulate their data in a 3D space.
The formal grammar they defined to govern the tool and it’s applicability seemed very interesting. I sort of lack context for this research discipline, and feel that this is a very interesting study pioneering data visualisations in a 3D Virtual Space. I feel this has a lot of potential going forward considering the Data Science and Machine Learning explosion that we are witnessing. I appreciate the research being at the forefront and sort of proposing a methodology and proper structure to answer their research questions. This is a very gentle nudge for me towards my project development.
A limitation that the authors did address, was that ImAxes does not integrate automated analytics tools or presentation algorithms which might be very crucial in Information Vizualisation.
It did not seem to be a natural read like the Paper on Parallel Prototyping last week, but made you read more and dig inside to understand and extract insight. Furthermore, something that was not clear to me is the fact that wether the visualiasations were hard coded or is ImAxes capable of presnting data in other formats other than Multidimensional PCPs and SPLOMs . This is because it can have multiple applications other than Data Visualisation such as Anomaly Detections, Learning especially complex statistical and mathematical concepts.