Report
Introduction
On January 19th, 2005, a group of 25
experts in Information Visualization, Geospatial Information Systems,
Collaborative Interfaces, Immersive Interfaces, Scientific
Visualization and related disciplines convened at the Silicon Graphics
(SGI) headquarters at Mountain View, CA to explore the possibilities
implied by the convergence of the technology and general literacy in
these fields. I found it somewhat satisfying that this
group has settled on the same dimensions of Visualization that I have
and in general were aligned with the way I view the future of
visualization for exploration, discovery and analysis.
Organizers Katy Borner and Bonnie DeVarco simultaneously herded
approximately 25 hyperactive cats (some would say badgers) through a
day of presentations and discussions while documenting the day quite
thoroughly with the help of an AV person and a professional illustrator
who listened to our discussions and drew images and words that captured
much of what was discussed.
As an invited guest, I was very impressed by the quality, not only of
the presentations and the organization but the discussion in
general. It was a model I would like to see employed for other
workshops of this type.
At the end of the meeting one participant challenged the group as a
whole to continue the work "virtually" after the meeting, implying that
if we cannot employ the tools we are promoting for our own work, then
perhaps they are not ready for prime time, or we are not fit to be the
ones to promote such tools. The group was guardedly
receptive, both supporting the idea that a continued conversation was
desireable and probably quite doable with the tools at hand, but also
that face-to-face communication such as we were experiencing that day
was still the best possible way to do the kinds of brainstorming we did.
To that end, I have suggested to several that a Wiki site might be an
excellent way to continue this. Others suggested other tools for
asynchronous telecollaboration and meeting. Whatever we may
collectively choose, I will submit this report as an integral
part. In the spirit of rich media and sharing, I have chosen HTML
as my format for this document.
Katy and Bonnie have promised to deliver a straw-man
white-paper to the group to add to,
and I will link that into this document as it is made available and
evolves. Here are some of the pre-presentation
slides
compiled before the
workshop.
Presentations
Despite arriving late (having
automatically driven to the pre-crash facilities of SGI first and
having to get directions up the road to SGI's more modest yet still
anything but humble new digs), I was able to see all of the
presentations and engage in all but the opening discussions.
As the host of this meeting, SGI was given
rich opportunity to preach to the choir about high quality
visualization, immersive interfaces, etc. They hosted this
session in their ever-popular Reality Center which they use as a
prototype and demonstration environment for the kinds of centers they
install worldwide for corporate, academic and government
clients. The center stage of this incarnation of the
Reality Center is a large (10' x 30') curved (dual axis, toroidal
section) screen front-projected by 3 high resolution projectors (make
and resolution unknown to me) and driven (surely) by a very hot SGI
box. SGI is known for their large, shared memory,
multi-processor, multi-pipe equipment. The LANL VIEWs system
consists of several of the largest examples of these machines with
hundreds of video outputs.
One of the more senior SGI staff from the UK (David Hughes) gave us a
walk down memory lane, focusing on 3D graphics and SGI's play in
it. Aside from having developed all of the early commercia 3D
pipeline transformers and renderers and workstations, SGI also was the
incubator and sometimes partner for/in most of their competition in the
commodity graphics world (ATI, nVidia, etc) and in the game system
world starting with Nintendo XX in 19XX..
Hughes then segued from reminiscing and reviewing the huge changes in
technology, application and culture over the years to one of their more
interesting products, the
Media
Fusion Engine which he is intimately involved in the development
of.
My perspective of the product, which appears to be both a commercial
product and an ongoing research project, is that it provides one aspect
of approximately what I've been hoping we could achieve with
Flatland... a single, virtual 3D workspace where many tools outside the
environment could be integrated or "fused" into a single working
space. Active signals/visualizations from other platforms
could be fed into the enviroment which would mediate where those were
placed in the environment and how they were interacted with. This
product/concept seems to juxtapose nicely with another technology shown
later in the day they call
Visual Area Networking.
Only 3 simple organizational metaphors were shown for the workspace,
but with a true 3D environment many more suggest
themselves. While 2D desktops tend to be limited to
"stacking" and "docking", this 3D environment easily handled
arrangements more reminiscent of variously familiar items like a
rolodex, carousel, and multiple complex stacks.
Conversations with Hughes offline, after the fact suggest that they are
very eager to collaborate with anyone such as ourselves who have
existing experience with such environments (viz. Flatland).
CSISS
GeoVista
ECAI
ISDE
The state of Geospatial Visualization was presented by Eric Frost of
GeoFusion and
GEON(a Grid Infrastructure for the
Geosciences). Eric covered not only the familiar world of
ESRI and it's suite of products and
tools, but also opened up the big world of open-source and Grid-enabled
tools being used by the non-profit, academic and government
organizations around the world who need open, collaborative
solutions. This talk primarily set the stage for a
presentation later in the session from (John Graham,
SDSU) and
others who demonstrated a fully collaborative remote visualization
system built primarily (exclusively?) of public domain or widely
available tools, supporting hundreds of workers from different
organizations and countries currently involved in the Tsunami Relief
effort. On a completely different planet, they showed the
same technology applied to the
Mars
Landers . The story, as told and demonstrated was very
convincing. I am now (more than ever) a believer in the
real value and utility of distance collaboration in these
circumstances, and in the advantage of commodity and open source
software and data. It appears that geospatial systems are no
longer for those who can afford several thousands of dollars per seat
for highly private, closed systems. This section is missing
several links and references that I hope I will get from any resulting
white paper, etc.
Mike Liebhold presented work on geo-registered augmented reality where
GPS technology is combined with geospatial databases and real-time
image capture, processing and display to provide heads-down and
eventually heads-up overlays and annotations for everyone from
first-responders in crisis situations to museum or gallery
patrons.
Jaron Lanier,
who was slated to speak during dinner weighed in heavily on many topics
related to practical geospatial registration at that scale and
encouraged all participants to provide for resolutions on the order of
.1mm or better. Jaron also had a lot to offer on the current
state of the art in practical geolocation including orientation
(x,y,z,roll,pitch,yaw) suitable for heads-up display augmented reality.
Information Visualization using the Cartographic Metaphor
Katy Borner,
workshop organizer from Indiana University and Kevin Boyack of Sandia
National Laboratory presented their work using
VxInsight
to map knowledge domains. Katy also showed the work she did with
her students which won the
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/InfovisRepository/contest-2004/contest in
October 2004 and made the cover of the
PNAS issue on
Mapping Knowledge Domains in April 2004.
Andre Skupin spoke on
his own work in applying cartographic and geographic metaphors using
self-organizing-maps (SOM) on knowledge domain visualization. He
introduced the "first principle of geography" that "proximity implies
similarity". Simple but subtle and powerful and very central to
geospatial metaphors of information visualization.
Ramana Rao, a former Xerox PARC
researcher, started with a cartographic metaphor of terrain maps
then moved us further afield into information visualization, holding
only onto the metaphor of "navigation" in introducing his work in
"Navigating heirarchies, wide widgets" embodied in his
InXight(tm) software.
Rao also showed his contribution to the highly acclaimed book and
website
Understanding USA
compiled by Richard Saul Wurman. Rao is credited with two
fundamental information visualization techniques, hyperbolic tree
exploration and table lenses.
Mike Liebhold of the
IFTF then spoke on
place centered
computing and
Geoweb and the
Evolution of Deep Place, of
Spatial
Awareness and Spatial Thinking. The main thrust of this
talk was about the use of GPS and other location technology along with
augmented reality technology which
supports the visual (and other sensory) overlay of synthetic perceptual
informatin onto the direct perceptions. This talk was a bit of a
divergence from the others, having a very 1st person approach that
assumes ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous location technology and
non-invasive visual and auditory augmentation. By coincidence, I
believe that it was our colleague, Dr. Tom Caudell who coined the term
"augmented reality" while at Boeing, developing the use of "heads-up
displays" for overlaying schematics and other diagrams for workers deep
inside the wings or fuselage of airplanes as they were being
built.
Implications for "us"
This report does not replace the need
for a visionary "white paper" on these topics but is perhaps the seed
of such a paper. I felt very inspired during this meeting
and deeply satisfied that many of the ideas I'd been working with for
years had hit a critical mass of people who had managed to find
eachother.
Infrastructure Analysis
Infrastructures have a confounding dual
nature, being both relational/logical entities and physical entities at
the same time. The geospatial registration of
infrastructures is relatively obvious if challenging. The
locational overlay of energy grids, transportation systems, financial
networks, communication networks, etc. is a very natural and
important view of all things "infrastructural". The geospatial
correlation between infrastructural elements and "field" effects such
as weather, natural disasters, even politics is obvious and
important. At the same time, many of these infrastructures are
highly structured as "networks" where the topological properties are in
their own way more important than their spatial
relationships. These two "views" of the domain are equally
valid and neither should exclude the other. Similarly, there are
also "implicit" relationships across these high dimensional data sets
where the connections are either obscured or unknown but can be
discovered through careful data analysis. Visual analytics and
visual data mining tools come to play in seeking partial correlation
between items or sets which are not connected explicitely either by
geospatial proximity, nor by graph or network structure. The rich
interplay between these different views of the same data and systems is
going to require the coordinated application of techniques from spatial
data analysis, high dimensional data analysis and graph analysis.
Network Monitoring and Intrusion Detection
Computer networks are a very specialized but in some ways
representative example of infrastructures in general. All of the
issues that arise in digital computer networks are likely to be seen in
other systems as well as coupling with the other systems. There
may be a useful organism metaphor to be applied here with digital
communication networks mimicing the function of the neurological
systems in higher organisms, while the vascular system mirrors the
transportation network and the immunological system mirrors the
emergency response system, etc.
Digital networks are somewhat unique and interesting because they tend
to be systems that can be explored from the "inside"... rather than
observeing them from the outside (by flying over them, mapping them,
imaging them in some way), they are explored more by passively
monitoring the data (including timestamps, routing info, etc) itself or
actively by deliberately routing information and observing it's
behaviour.
It is important for many reasons (reliability and security being the
most obvious) to understand computer networks from a geographic point
of view. "What country does that host that hacked into us
reside?", "Will that network link go down if there is power failure at
X location?", etc.
Information Visualization, Perceptualization, Visual Analytics
All of these terms apply to related problems and technological
approaches. They all are based on the assumption that the
human perceptual system somehow enhances cognition or cognitive
coupling with abstract systems, data sets, problems. This
workshop was most interesting to me because it had a wide range of
people presenting and in attendance who understand this implicitely and
are pursuing aspects of these problems, each in their own way, for
their own purposes.
Those who see the world primarily through it's geographic registration
are still quite interested in what is hidden from them by that
approach. Those who traditionally might not think of geolocation
as being particularly relevant are working with larger data sets or
with the geographically distributed (and therefore relevant?) systems
they represent are becoming more interested in using and understanding
the geographic knowledge that they have.
The juxtaposition of these two somewhat different views of the world
helps to enhance an awareness of the value of "place" and "location"
and "orientation" and to validate to a small extent what those of us
who have pushed for immersive interfaces have believed for a long time,
that a "sense of presence" and/or "shared place" with data can be
important and valuable and useful in exploration and analysis.
Conclusions
There are no specific, "aha!" type conclusions for me to report.
The experience for me was somewhat more like "coming home" than
anything else. In this case, I came "home" to a familiar place
which is now populated by a lot more people who see things in a richer,
more synthetic way than is common in the "real world". I believe
that this fusion of multiple ways of percieving, thinking about, and
presenting information is the future.
There is so much work left to be done in each of these fields
(geospatial visualization, information visualization, scientific
visualization, geolocation, augmented reality, immersive interfaces,
etc) that they will continue on quite validly without neccesarily
needing eachother for their independent progress. On the other
hand, there is great opportunity for those of us who do see the
crossover to exploit it and to contribute across multiple fields
simultaneously while drawing from each of them.
I am reinforced in my belief in using vision and other perceptions to
enhance our access to data, cognition and collaboration. I am
reinforced in my belief that shared collaborative and telecollaborative
environments which are rich in media can be very supportive of
exploration, discovery, analysis and communication in all fields of
endeavor. Physical science and technological innovation being the
most obvious and relevant to my own work, but sociology, political
science and even art can equally benefit.
