Towards Visual Sedimentation

Samuel Huron (1, 2) , Romain Vuillemot (1) , Jean-Daniel Fekete (1)

1 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization
2 AVIS

We present Visual Sedimentation, a new design metaphor for visualizing streaming data inspired by the geological process of sedimentation. Our work started by early experiments visualiz- ing political Twitter streams during the French 2012 presidential elections, and social interactions during a TV show. In both cases, the positive feedback we received expressed an unexpectedly high level of engagement from users, guiding our generalization of the metaphor. This article explores Visual Sedimentation and describes a new generative design space for Information Visualization. Geological sedimentation is our inspiration as it smoothly aggregates falling objects by com- pacting them into strata. We use this idea to visualize changing in- formation in a new way by providing continuity between the repre- sentation of new and older data. The metaphor preserves an overall visual encoding while making it suitable for monitoring streaming data generated at unpredictable rates.

Mots clés: Backchannel; Design; Information Visualization; Incremental Visualization; Data Stream; Social TV; Backchannel.

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Samuel Huron, Romain Vuillemot, Jean-Daniel Fekete. Towards Visual Sedimentation. Posters of the IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis), Oct 2012, Seattle, United States. ⟨hal-00734084⟩