Common reporting styles for statistical results in scientific articles, such as p-values and confidence intervals (CI), have been reported to be prone to dichotomous interpretations, especially with respect to the null hypothesis significance testing framework. For example when the p-value is small enough or the CIs of the mean effects of a studied drug and a placebo are not overlapping, scientists tend to claim significant differences while often disregarding the magnitudes and absolute differences in the effect sizes. This type of reasoning has been shown to be potentially harmful to science. Techniques relying on the visual estimation of the strength of evidence have been recommended to reduce such dichotomous interpretations but their effectiveness has also been challenged. We ran two experiments on researchers with expertise in statistical analysis to compare several alternative representations of confidence intervals and used Bayesian multilevel models to estimate the effects of the representation styles on differences in researchers' subjective confidence in the results. We also asked the respondents' opinions and preferences in representation styles. Our results suggest that adding visual information to classic CI representation can decrease the tendency towards dichotomous interpretations - measured as the 'cliff effect': the sudden drop in confidence around p-value 0.05 - compared with classic CI visualization and textual representation of the CI with p-values. All data and analyses are publicly available at https://github.com/helske/statvis.

Parallel coordinates are commonly used for non-temporal multivariate data, but there is little support for their usability for displaying temporal multivariate data. In this paper, we introduce a study evaluating the usability of 2D and 3D parallel coordinates for pattern identification in temporal multivariate data. The results indicate that 3D parallel coordinates have higher usability, as measured with higher accuracy and faster response time as well as subjective ratings, compared to 2D.

Eye-tracking has become an invaluable tool for the analysis of working practices in many technological fields of activity. Typically studies focus on short tasks and use static expected areas of interest (AoI) in the display to explore subjects' behaviour, making the analyst's task quite straightforward. In long-duration studies, where the observations may last several hours over a complete work session, the AoIs may change over time in response to altering workload, emergencies or other variables making the analysis more difficult. This work puts forward a novel method to automatically identify spatial AoIs changing over time through a combination of clustering and cluster merging in the temporal domain. A visual analysis system based on the proposed methods is also presented. Finally, we illustrate our approach within the domain of air traffic control, a complex task sensitive to prevailing conditions over long durations, though it is applicable to other domains such as monitoring of complex systems.

Activity diaries are a powerful data source for studying the time use of individuals and for creating awareness of individuals' daily activity patterns. The presented project is concerned with the development of an easily accessible method for collecting and analyzing diary data which will be applicable across a wide range of industrial, governmental, social science and medical domains. The PODD (POrtable Diary Data collection) is composed of a smartphone application for data registration, a web interface for user registration and an administration system for configuring the application according to the focus of the data collection.

Virtual coupling, a spring-damper system between the haptic probe and its virtual representation, the proxy, is one of the most common approaches for haptic rendering. We have extended the virtual coupling by updating the spring stiffness, sometimes used to simulate compliance of a material, depending on the direction between the proxy and the probe. This anisotropic variation of the stiffness is used in exploring inhomogeneities beneath the surface allowing detection of rigid structures even when they are obscured by another structure beneath the surface. In addition, we also compensate for the energy variation of the spring to maintain passivity and increase realism. User studies were performed to survey the success rate in the detection of obscured rigid bodies beneath the surface with the modified virtual coupling algorithm and the improvement of shape perception for sub-surface objects with the additional energy compensation term providing gradient information. We also discuss potential benefits of the proposed methods as basic extensions to well-known haptic rendering algorithms which are both simpler and yield improved performance over traditional deformation simulation techniques.

This paper addresses some fundamental issues that need to be considered when reporting an evaluation study in visualization or other areas that develop visual interfaces. Today evaluations are frequently included in publications in these fields, however there exists no uniform standard for reporting formats. Instead there is heterogeneity in the structure and content provided and often important information is missing, making it hard to gain insight and trust in the results and conclusions. Consequently there is a need for an easy to access guidance on how to accomplish sound reporting with high quality. This is the only way in which authors can enable an assessment of the validity of a study and enable it to be replicated by others in order to verify it. This paper presents a first effort to introduce guidelines on what constitutes an effective structure and what content to address and how. It also points out common pitfalls and mistakes when reporting and how these can be avoided. The paper could be used as a guide by authors when describing their evaluation studies and it could also be helpful when reviewing publications presenting such work since the same guidelines for content apply.

Findings from field studies in power system control rooms show that overview displays are needed to aid operators to achieve shared situation awareness. The existing overview displays are often cluttered, with a lot of detailed information and with overuse of colors. There is no "best practice'' in the field and it is up to power system utilities to design their own displays. This work presents a survey of previously proposed mappings of power system data to visual representations and based on this analysis a set of alternative mappings are demonstrated.

The parameter estimation variance of the Single Point Active Alignment Method (SPAAM) is studied through an experiment where 11 subjects are instructed to create alignments using an Optical See-Through Head Mounted Display (OSTHMD) such that three separate correspondence point distributions are acquired. Modeling the OSTHMD and the subject's dominant eye as a pinhole camera, findings show that a correspondence point distribution well distributed along the user's line of sight yields less variant parameter estimates. The estimated eye point location is studied in particular detail. The findings of the experiment are complemented with simulated data which show that image plane orientation is sensitive to the number of correspondence points. The simulated data also illustrates some interesting properties on the numerical stability of the calibration problem as a function of alignment noise, number of correspondence points, and correspondence point distribution.

While label placement algorithms are generally successful in managing visual clutter by preventing label overlap, they can also cause significant label movement in dynamic displays. This study investigates motion detection thresholds for various types of label movement in realistic and complex virtual environments, which can be helpful for designing less salient and disturbing algorithms. Our results show that label movement in stereoscopic depth is shown to be less noticeable than similar lateral monoscopic movement, inherent to 2D label placement algorithms. Furthermore, label movement can be introduced more readily into the visual periphery (over 15° eccentricity) because of reduced sensitivity in this region. Moreover, under the realistic viewing conditions that we used, motion of isolated labels is more easily detected than that of overlapping labels. This perhaps counterintuitive finding may be explained by visual masking due to the visual clutter arising from the label overlap. The quantitative description of the findings presented in this paper should be useful not only for label placement applications, but also for any cluttered AR or VR application in which designers wish to control the users' visual attention, either making text labels more or less noticeable as needed.

An interesting property of the commonly used parallel coordinates display is the distinct overall pattern formed by the totality of lines between adjacent axes. These patterns have a direct correspondence to the type of relationship existing between the variables mapped onto the axes in question as well as a salient visual appearance. Parallel coordinates displays can therefore be used to visually investigate relationships between variables as well as investigating individual objects/lines. The problem with this approach is that, whereas each object is mapped in its entirety in a standard parallel coordinates display, only a small subset of the interrelations between variables is shown as the number of variables increase. To show all possible relations between variables multiple parallel coordinates displays are needed. In turn this means that each variable is duplicated several times, once per extra parallel coordinates display. To a viewer this increases the visual complexity and most probably the mental load. To aid users we have devised a new configuration of the axes in multiple parallel coordinates displays. Through an experiment we have also started to investigate the usability of this new configuration and the results are promising.

The identification of significant sequences in large and complex event-based temporal data is a challenging problem with applications in many areas of today's information intensive society. Pure visual representations can be used for the analysis, but are constrained to small data sets. Algorithmic search mechanisms used for larger data sets become expensive as the data size increases and typically focus on frequency of occurrence to reduce the computational complexity, often overlooking important infrequent sequences and outliers. In this paper we introduce an interactive visual data mining approach based on an adaptation of techniques developed for web searching, combined with an intuitive visual interface, to facilitate user-centred exploration of the data and identification of sequences significant to that user. The search algorithm used in the exploration executes in negligible time, even for large data, and so no pre-processing of the selected data is required, making this a completely interactive experience for the user. Our particular application area is social science diary data but the technique is applicable across many other disciplines.

Abstract The rendering of large data sets can result in cluttered displays and non‐interactive update rates, leading to time consuming analyses. A straightforward solution is to reduce the number of items, thereby producing an abstraction of the data set. For the visual analysis to remain accurate, the graphical representation of the abstraction must preserve the significant features present in the original data. This paper presents a screen space quality method, based on distance transforms, that measures the visual quality of a data abstraction. This screen space measure is shown to better capture significant visual structures in data, compared with data space measures. The presented method is implemented on the GPU, allowing interactive creation of high quality graphical representations of multivariate data sets containing tens of thousands of items.

With current methods for volume haptics in scientific visualization, features in time-varying data can freely move straight through the haptic probe without generating any haptic feedback the algorithms are simply not designed to handle variation with time but consider only the instantaneous configuration when the haptic feedback is calculated. This article introduces haptic rendering of dynamic volumetric data to provide a means for haptic exploration of dynamic behaviour in volumetric data. We show how haptic feedback can be produced that is consistent with volumetric data moving within the virtual environment and with data that, in itself, evolves over time. Haptic interaction with time-varying data is demonstrated by allowing palpation of a CT sequence of a beating human heart.

The ability to identify and examine patterns of activities is a key tool for social and behavioural science. In the past this has been done by statistical or purely visual methods but automated sequential pattern analysis through sophisticated data mining and visualization tools for pattern location and evaluation can open up new possibilities for interactive exploration of the data. This paper describes the addition of a sequential pattern identification method to the visual activity-analysis tool, VISUAL-TimePAcTS, and its effectiveness in the process of pattern analysis in social science diary data. The results have shown that the method correctly identifies patterns and conveys them effectively to the social scientist in a manner that allows them quick and easy understanding of the significance of the patterns.

This paper introduces Temporal Density Parallel Coordinates (TDPC) and Depth Cue Parallel Coordinates (DCPC) which extend the standard 2D parallel coordinates technique to capture time-varying dynamics. The proposed techniques can be used to analyse temporal positions of data items as well as temporal positions of changes occurring using 2D displays. To represent temporal changes, polygons (instead of traditional lines) are rendered in parallel coordinates. The results presented show that rendering polygons is superior at revealing large temporal changes. Both TDPC and DCPC have been efficiently implemented on the GPU allowing the visualization of thousands of data items over thousands of time steps at interactive frame rates.

In this paper we present an in situ evaluation of a haptic system, with a representative test population, we aim to determine what, if any, benefit haptics can have in a biomolecular education context. We have developed a haptic application for conveying concepts of molecular interactions, specifically in protein-ligand docking. Utilizing a semi-immersive environment with stereo graphics, users are able to manipulate the ligand and feel its interactions in the docking process. The evaluation used cognitive knowledge tests and interviews focused on learning gains. Compared with using time efficiency as the single quality measure this gives a better indication of a system's applicability in an educational environment. Surveys were used to gather opinions and suggestions for improvements. Students do gain from using the application in the learning process but the learning appears to be independent of the addition of haptic feedback. However the addition of force feedback did decrease time requirements and improved the students understanding of the docking process in terms of the forces involved, as is apparent from the students' descriptions of the experience. The students also indicated a number of features which could be improved in future development

Analysing multivariate data is a difficult task. Extensive interaction with the data is often necessary and, hence, the analysis can be quite time consuming. In this paper, we introduce a method to allow the user to simultaneously examine the relationships of a single dimension with many others in the data. The single dimension can then be interactively changed to allow the user to quickly examine all possible combinations. This method is achieved by extending the standard parallel coordinate approach to a 3D clustered multi-relational parallel coordinate representation (CMRPC). To aid this method, we use a technique called relation spacing which is used to position the axes according to how 'interesting' the different relations are. We also propose a number of interaction techniques to further facilitate the analysis process.

When planning a Leksell GammaKnife/spl reg/ treatment, dose planners place iso-centres of the irradiation field in such a way that a certain iso-dose surface conforms as closely as possible to a target, such as a tumour. Today this planning is done primarily in 2D, and the clinician places the iso-centres onto the current medical image. The images used are usually acquired by MRl, CT or angiography. In This work we investigate the use of interactive 3D visualization and haptics to perform the dose planning. In a pilot implementation we provide the user with a virtual environment with real-time graphics to visualize the target, surrounding tissue and iso-dose surfaces as well as an integrated graphical user interface. The overall aim of the implementation is to increase the efficiency and precision of the planning process by adding haptic feedback to represent various constraints and opportunities in the planning process and so guide the user to an optimal placement of the iso-centres. Preliminary feedback from potential users has been very positive.