Visualizations are tools that translate raw and complex data into meaningful graphics. They leverage human perception to summarize data in a cognitively efficient way, making them popular in science, analysis, and the media. Display capacity is an essential resource for designing visualizations. Different displays provide different capabilities in terms of how the data can be visually represented and how people can interact with visualizations.
In this talk, Yalong Yang of Harvard University will present his experience in designing and evaluating novel visualizations on flat screens, in VR/AR, and in physical formats. He will focus in particular on VR/AR, which allows his team to remove the boundaries of physical screens and envision dramatically new human-computer interaction experiences.
Yang will first outline the unique features VR/AR provides for visualization design and then demonstrate how to utilize them to build novel and effective immersive visualizations. Finally, he will describe the vision of the future workspace, where people are primarily using VR/AR to see and interact with the digital world. Yang will discuss grand challenges for the future and conclude on an optimistic note: with deep integration between hardware, software, and user experience, we could achieve this vision in the near future.
Yalong Yang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Before joining Harvard University, he received his Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia, on a thesis titled “Visualising Geographically-Embedded Origin-Destination Flows: in 2D and immersive environments.”
His research concerns many aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Visualization (VIS), and VR/AR. He is especially interested in the emerging research topic — Immersive Analytics, which focuses on applying engaging, embodied display and interaction techniques (e.g., VR/AR) for data visualization and analytics. He has published 11 papers at top-tier visualization venues (IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and EuroVis) and is an active member of these communities on promoting immersive analytics research. He also received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at IEEE VIS – InfoVis 2016.
Contact Ginny Watterson for Zoom link.