What's the Situation with Situated Visualization? A Survey and Perspectives on Situatedness

Nathalie Bressa, Henrik Korsgaard, Aurélien Tabard, Steven Houben, Jo Vermeulen

View presentation:2021-10-27T17:30:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2021-10-27T17:30:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
Top: Title of the paper ("What’s the Situation with Situated Visualization? A Survey and Perspectives on Situatedness") and author information (Nathalie Bressa, Henrik Korsgaard, Aurélien Tabard, Steven Houben, Jo Vermeulen). Left: The five perspectives that we introduce (space, time, place, activity, and community) and photos of the six representative cases (Corsican Twin, Situated Glyphs, Cairn, Chemicals in the Creek, Activity Clock, and Public Polling Displays). Right: Photo gallery of the corpus for our literature survey consisting of 44 papers using the term "situated visualization". Bottom: Affiliation logos (Aarhus University, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Eindhoven University of Technology, Autodesk Research).
Fast forward

Direct link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fzHGkDlVKdc

Abstract

Situated visualization is an emerging concept within information visualization, in which data is visualized in situ, where it is relevant to people. The concept has gained interest from multiple research communities, including information visualization, human-computer interaction and augmented reality. This has led to a range of explorations and applications of the concept, however, this early work has focused on the operational aspect of situatedness leading to inconsistent adoption of the concept and terminology. First, we contribute a literature survey in which we analyze 40 papers that explicitly use the term "situated visualization" to provide an overview of the research area, how it defines situated visualization, common application areas and technology used, as well as type of data and type of visualizations. Our survey shows that research on situated visualization has focused on technology-centric approaches that forefront a spatial understanding of situatedness. Secondly, we contribute five perspectives on situatedness (space, time, place, activity, and community) that expand on the prevalent notion of situatedness in the corpus. We draw from six case studies and prior theoretical developments in HCI. Each perspective develops a generative way of looking at and working with situatedness in design and research. We outline future directions, including considering technology, material and aesthetics, leveraging the perspectives for design, and methods for stronger engagement with target audiences. We conclude with opportunities to consolidate situated visualization research.