Visage: An All-in-One Tool

A Paper by Roth, Lucas, Senn, et al.

Presented by Josh Steele

Lots of Good Things Out There..

• Table Lens– Focuses attention on subsets while still seeing

the context

• IVEE– Rapidly creates multiple DQ sliders

• SAGE– Rapid Design of visualizations that integrate

multiple attributes

I want all that and more….

• Select info from multiple apps, visualizations and tools – and combine them

• Enable rapid generation of visualizations (on the fly!)

• Filter, control level of detail, navigate, create new info whenever needed

• Share and communicate information

Introducing Visage

• Information Centric paradigm (more on this next slide)

• Dynamic Visualization Generation• Interactive Info manipulation

– Partitioning, filtering, combining, detail level (drill down/roll up)

• Assembling, laying out and interactively presenting info to others

Centering in on Information• Application-Centric

– The File is the object – need applications to retrieve and display

– Users can’t “touch” data

• Document-Centric

– Document is the object, and can be directly manipulated

– May serve as containers for other objects

– Can visualize relationships between documents

– Users can “get their hands on” the documents

• Information centric

– The data element is the object

– Drag and drop at any level of granularity

– OO approach introduced in Smalltalk et al

– Used in Visage

Demo Presentation

• *Please see in-class TV*

• An abbreviated version is available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sage/animations/Visage3.dcr

Main Components

• Elements

– The atomically-manipulable graphical objects

– Bars in bar chart, text label, point in a chart

– 1 to many relationship – one database element may be represented in many ways

• Frames

– Hold the elements (are actually elements themselves)

– Provide grouping and reference for elements

– Serve as anchor points for scripts (which guide most of Visage’s behavior)

• Scripts allow new values to be calculated

Show it off!

• Presentation tools built in

• Allows interactivity in the slides themselves! Each slide is a fully functional Visage frame

Visage! What’s it good for?

• Representing data in several views (not just in your typical charts(pie, bar, etc))

• Dynamic Queries on that data

• Quick presentation generation (with interactivity during the presentation)

• Selecting only certain information

HCI Metrics

• User Performance - ***??

• Error Recovery - ??

• User Satisfaction - ??

• Learning Time - ***

• Retention - ****

How does it compare?

• Number of variables?

• Number of data points?

• Pixel use?

• When would you not use this?