Exploring Mobile Device Interactions for Information Visualization

Research output: Types of thesisDoctoral thesis

Abstract

Information visualization (InfoVis) makes data accessible in a graphical form, enables visual and interactive data exploration, and is becoming increasingly important in our data-driven world - InfoVis empowers people from various domains to truly benefit from abstract and vast amounts of data. Although they often target desktop environments, nowadays, data visualizations are also used on omnipresent mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. However, most mobile devices are personal digital companions, typically visualizing moderately complex data (e.g., fitness, health, finances, weather, public transport data) on a single and very compact display, making it inherently hard to show the full range or simultaneously different perspectives of data. The research in this thesis engages with these aspects by striving for novel mobile device interactions that enable data analysis with more than a single device, more than a single visualization view, and more than a single user. At the core of this dissertation are four realized projects that can be connected by the following research objectives: (i) Facilitating data visualization beyond the casual exploration of personal data, (ii) Integrating mobile devices in multi-device settings for InfoVis, and (iii) Exploiting the mobility and spatiality of mobile devices for InfoVis. To address the first objective, my research mainly concentrates on interactions with multivariate data represented in multiple coordinated views (MCV). To address the second objective, I consider two different device settings in my work: One part investigates scenarios where one or more people sit at a regular table and analyze data in MCV that are distributed across several mobile devices (mobile devices on a table). The other part focuses on scenarios in which a wall-sized display shows large-scale MCV and mobile devices enable interactions with the visualizations from varying positions and distances (mobile devices in 3D space). The settings also allow to look at different purposes and roles of mobile devices during data exploration. To address the third objective, I examine different spatial device interactions. This includes placing and organizing multiple mobile devices in meaningful spatial arrangements and also pointing interaction that combines touch and spatial device input. Overall, with my research, I apply an exploratory approach and develop a range of techniques and studies that contribute to the understanding of how mobile devices can be used not only for typical personal visualization but also in more professional settings as part of novel and beyond-the-desktop InfoVis environments.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Qualification levelDr.-Ing.
Awarding Institution
Supervisors/Advisors
Defense Date (Date of certificate)16 Dec 2024
Place of PublicationDresden, Germany
Publisher
  • QUCOSA
Publication statusPublished - 14 Jan 2025
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External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-4519-2168/work/184440590

Keywords

Keywords

  • Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, Mobile Devices, Visual Data Analysis, Multiple Coordinated Views, Mensch-Computer-Interaktion, Informationsvisualisierung, Mobilgeräte, Visuelle Datenanalyse, Mehrere Koordinierte Ansichten