VisWall: Visual Data Exploration Using Direct Combination on Large Touch Displays

Abstract

An increasing number of data visualization tools are being designed for touch-based devices ranging from smartwatches to large wall-sized displays. While most of these tools have focused on exploring novel techniques to manually specify visualizations, recent touch-based visualization systems have begun to explore interface and interaction techniques for attribute-based visualization recommendations as a way to aid users (particularly novices) during data exploration. Advancing this line of work, we present a visualization system, VisWall, that enables visual data exploration in both single user and co-located collaborative settings on large touch displays. Coupling the concepts of direct combination and derivable visualizations, VisWall enables rapid construction of multivariate visualizations using attributes of previously created visualizations. By blending visualization recommendations and naturalistic interactions, VisWall seeks to help users visually explore their data by allowing them to focus more on aspects of the data (particularly, data attributes) rather than specifying and reconfiguring visualizations. We discuss the design, interaction techniques, and operations employed by VisWall along with a scenario of how these can be used to facilitate various tasks during visual data exploration.