Visualizing Information using Motion Properties of Data-Driven "Infoticles"
Channel: Andrew Vande Moere
Date: 25/04/2012

An exploratory data visualization application developed around the year 2003 (!) for an tele-immersive virtual reality installation, called "blue-c". The basic idea is that data entries are represented as particles (here coined as "info-titles"), which float around in 3D, stereoscopic and immersive space. These infoticles can be grasped, filtered and highlighted by users by means of bodily gestures. 

The dataset consists of the internal document usage logs within Arup, an international building engineering company. Each particle represents a unique document in their internal intranet, containing some proprietary knowledge. If the document is downloaded in a particular location, its corresponding particle is attracted to a corresponding force in 3D space. Depending on the global usage patterns of these documents, the particles will behave and convey particular dynamic behaviors that can be visually recognized.

The video also shows the tele-immersive capabilities of the blue-c installation, able to record and display 3D representations of users in real-time at 2 remote locations.

More information is available here: 

Vande Moere, A., Mieusset, K. H. and Gross, M. (2004). "Visualizing Abstract Information using Motion Properties of Data-Driven Infoticles", Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA'04), IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, SPIE, San Jose, USA, pp. 33-44.
http://infoscape.org/publications/spie04.pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.539238

Vande Moere, A. (2002). "Infoticles: Information Modeling in Immersive Environments", IEEE International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV02), IEEE, London, England, pp. 457-461.
http://infoscape.org/publications/iv02.pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IV.2002.1028813

Vande Moere, A. (2004). "Time-Varying Data Visualization using Information Flocking Boids", IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (Infovis 2004), IEEE, Austin, USA, pp. 97-104.
http://infoscape.org/publications/infovis04.pdf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/INFVIS.2004.65

Gross, M., Würmlin, S., Naef, M., Lamboray, E., Spagno, C., Kunz, A., Koller-Meier, E., Svoboda, T., Van Gool, L., Lang, S., Strehlke, K., Vande Moere, A. and Staadt, O. (2003). "blue-c: A Spatially Immersive Display and 3D Video Portal for Telepresence", ACM SIGGRAPH 2003, ACM Press, San Diego, USA, pp. 819-827.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1201775.882350