Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich
M.Sc. Joshua Reibert
M.Sc. Sebastian Stickert

Information visualization is more and more present on mobile devices, especially in news articles and social media. Yet, professional visual analytics tools and current research rarely target mobile devices. Even though current smartphones have powerful processors and high display resolutions, the screen space is limited and touch input does not allow fine-grained interaction. Hence, visualization on mobile devices is typically more casual and not used for visual analytics yet.

In this project we will analyze the state-of-the art of mobile visualizations as well as its limitations and challenges. Based on this, we will then design and implement prototype visualizations for smartphones or smartwatches. Interaction can help overcome the limited screen space and many input modalities such as touch, pen, gesture, and voice input are available. Finally, such visualizations can also complement visualization systems with larger screens as personal views or for remote interaction.

In this project our students Aalok Gokhale, Josef Roth, Martin Unterreiner, and Yen Lung Chen started their investigation by exploring visualizations “in the wild”. Given relevant research papers and commercial guidelines for designing content on mobile devices, the team evaluated them with respect to usability and responsiveness.

After gaining a better understanding of challenges involved in mobile information visualization, each of the project participants prepared pitches for a project contribution. These were thoroughly discussed and refined within the group.

The team then designed a concept for a web-based data visualization application, which visualizes multivariate waste data of the EU countries with parallel coordinates and touch interactions specifically tailored towards mobile devices. Several screen mock-ups and the flow of interaction were sketched up on paper and later digitized to inform and prioritize features for the application. Finally, the concept was implemented using the javascript frameworks vue and d3.

The video below showcases the application developed by our students. Test the application at moin.vrsys.org (or download the Android .apk at moin.vrsys.org/MoInVisApp.apk)