The design of a visualisation invariably depends upon the task(s) and the target user group it is designed to support. Exploratory and explanatory visualisations generally require different considerations. We consider the future of visualisations from this perspective.
It’s easy to think of information visualisation in terms of consumer products, brands and advertising but their adoption will reach much further. New industries, schools, even militaries will invariably adopt visualisation systems for better or worse. What happens when they do?
…ElectroEncephaloGram(EEG) technologies and our ability to technologically sense electric fields evolve significantly past where they are now.
Meanwhile human brain to computer communication using body-embedded-systems becomes De Rigueur, becoming extremely sophisticated and compact: we begin to embed these in our bodies – our communication, wayfinding and augmented analysis and processing are encapsulated in ourselves.
Your Will is the command for your own Personal Organic Network(PON)…
It matters little where the data, connection and files are as the interface is your own body interfaced invisibly with the Network at large – functioning as as one: smoothly, invisibly – a question is asked…and answered in imagined visions in the canvas of the mind.
I’m interested in: creative design, finding a needle in a haystack, explaining a complex medical treatment to a worried patient, delivering healthcare, helping different cultures understand each other, helping families stay connected, making scientific discoveries, art. For these, and for the visionaries who work on these tasks, the desktop is already on life support.
Migration from desktop-based to alternative out of the desk visualisations, could help to overcome some of the issues that are related to traditional screen representation problems. But simultaneously, it represents a challenge in which many technical and ethical questions have yet to be answered. Some thoughts about how visualisation outside the desktop could be applied are presented through three different categories: common objects, large scale augmented reality and natural devices.
A busy academic uses emerging technologies for filling his world with visualization to communicate with colleagues and order a sushi sandwich in hot-spaced London 2031.
Modern films such as the Iron Man series, Avengers, and Pacific Rim best exemplify visual interface designs that are futuristic, follow fluid interaction guidelines, and are yet not too distant. These movies show interaction models designed for direct manipulation of real and virtual objects in holographic projections, and also embodied interaction in completely immersive environments. Furthermore, these imagined interfaces have their own envisioned application domains ranging from casual computing, information browsing to creative design and even analytics. A common aspect among these many imagined futuristic user interfaces (FUI) is projection of different types: (1) head-mounted, (2) holographic, and (3) immersive projection. In this paper, we imagine the interaction models that can best-fit each of these projector display types when they are adapted to visualization and visual analytics. For this, we consider interaction models that go beyond a desktop to utilize implicit aspects within the environment such as proxemics and explicit actions through direct manipulation, gestures, tactile, and other forms of multi sensory feedback. We borrow application scenarios from the aforementioned movies and the general guideline behind our discussion is that projection type guides the interaction design.
We are writing the year 2100, due to excessive usage of monitors human eye capability has dramatically diminished and the ability to speak has vanished. Humans are wearing digital glasses to see the world and get predictive information, and are communicating through instant thought messaging captured by neuro-captors. This evolution has plunged our society as we know it into a “Have” and “Have-not” society where the rich can chose what they want to see and the poor are submerged and flooded with biased information with the sole goal of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
In the society that followed, knowledge demanded such precision that all decisions were based on analysing hundreds of possibilities using thousands of calculations and producing millions of data. In the course of time, the impracticality of a growing library of data led to the employment of Polyglots who curated the data, creating encyclopaedias and then charts describing their contents.
Desktops can be replaced with collaborative environments utilizing a combination of large scale screens for overviews, collaborative analysis and presentation; mobile devices for focused interactions and local exploration; and combinations of devices for layered visual composition.