In this paper we describe an interactive web-based tool for visual analysis of Formula 1 data. A calendar-like representation provides an overview of all races on a yearly basis, either in absolute or normalized time. After selecting a dedicated race more details about this race can be explored. Furthermore it is possible to compare up to three different races. Beside visualizing details on dedicated races it is also possible to analyse driver and team performance over time. A user study was applied to get feedback about the usage of the application and decide between different visualization options.

Public transport maps are typically designed in a way to support route finding tasks for passengers while they also provide an overview about stations, metro lines, and city-specific attractions. Most of those maps are designed as a static representation, maybe placed in a metro station or printed in a travel guide. In this paper we describe a dynamic, interactive public transport map visualization enhanced by additional views for the dynamic passenger data on different levels of temporal granularity. Moreover, we also allow extra statistical information in form of density plots, calendar-based visualizations, and line graphs. All this information is linked to the contextual metro map to give a viewer insights into the relations between time points and typical routes taken by the passengers. We illustrate the usefulness of our interactive visualization by applying it to the railway system of Hamburg in Germany while also taking into account the extra passenger data. As another indication for the usefulness of the interactively enhanced metro maps we conducted a user experiment with 20 participants.

In this paper we describe an interactive web-based visual analysis tool for Formula one races. It first provides an overview about all races on a yearly basis in a calendar-like representation. From this starting point, races can be selected and visually inspected in detail. We support a dynamic race position diagram as well as a more detailed lap times line plot for showing the drivers' lap times in comparison. Many interaction techniques are supported like selections, filtering, highlighting, color coding, or details-on-demand. We illustrate the usefulness of our visualization tool by applying it to a Formula one dataset while we describe the different dynamic visual racing patterns for a number of selected races and drivers.

Lots of movies are produced every year, too many to watch all of them and in particular, to get an overview about the evolution of typical movie genres and actors playing in them. Moreover, it is a challenging problem to detect correlations among the movies and the actors in those movies, in particular, if we are interested in time-varying data patterns like trends, countertrends, or anomalies and outliers. Those correlations are specifically interesting if they can be inspected on different levels of granularity, e.g., temporal, but also hierarchical in form of country- or continent-based correlations. In this paper we describe the IMDb Explorer, a web-based visualization tool that consists of two major views denoted by the movie cosmos and the career lines. Both views are linked and interactively manipulable while a list of user-defined metrics are explorable. We illustrate the usefulness of the visualization tool by applying it to the entire movie database provided by IMDb.

Painting galleries typically provide a wealth of data composed of several data types. Those multivariate data are too complex for laymen like museum visitors to first, get an overview about all paintings and to look for specific categories. Finally, the goal is to guide the visitor to a specific painting that he wishes to have a more closer look on. In this paper we describe an interactive visualization tool that first provides such an overview and lets people experiment with the more than 41,000 paintings collected in the web gallery of art. To generate such an interactive tool, our technique is composed of different steps like data handling, algorithmic transformations, visualizations, interactions, and the human user working with the tool with the goal to detect insights in the provided data. We illustrate the usefulness of the visualization tool by applying it to such characteristic data and show how one can get from an overview about all paintings to specific paintings.

Plenty of songs are composed, written, and releasedevery year being recorded in a variety of databases. Thosedo not only store the audio, but also additional data like theartists' names, the years of release, the lengths of the songs, or number of visits, comments, and remarks of visitors andthe like. However, another important data is the lyrics, i.e., thetextual content which can give insights about the topic, genre, or intention of the musicians. Getting an overview about thetextual content of a song, i.e., the lyrics can become a tediouschallenge since listening to the songs or reading the texts is a timeconsuming task. To support users of song databases we propose a visualization tool that is able to generate word clouds from lyrics. Interaction techniques are incorporated in the tool to give more detailed information about the occurrence of words in a song that finally help to find insights about the genre or to just compare the content very rapidly, for example. Our visualization tool is implemented as a web-based interface, that stores requests, updates the local tool database based on those requests, and finally, provides an interactive visualization for the user.

We investigated the influence of body shape and pose on the perception of physical strength and social power for male virtual characters. In the first experiment, participants judged the physical strength of varying body shapes, derived from a statistical 3D body model. Based on these ratings, we determined three body shapes (weak, average, and strong) and animated them with a set of power poses for the second experiment. Participants rated how strong or powerful they perceived virtual characters of varying body shapes that were displayed in different poses. Our results show that perception of physical strength was mainly driven by the shape of the body. However, the social attribute of power was influenced by an interaction between pose and shape. Specifically, the effect of pose on power ratings was greater for weak body shapes. These results demonstrate that a character with a weak shape can be perceived as more powerful when in a high-power pose.

Redirected walking techniques allow people to walk in a larger virtual space than the physical extents of the laboratory. We describe two experiments conducted to investigate human sensitivity to walking on a curved path and to validate a new redirected walking technique. In a psychophysical experiment, we found that sensitivity to walking on a curved path was significantly lower for slower walking speeds (radius of 10 m versus 22 m). In an applied study, we investigated the influence of a velocity-dependent dynamic gain controller and an avatar controller on the average distance that participants were able to freely walk before needing to be reoriented. The mean walked distance was significantly greater in the dynamic gain controller condition, as compared to the static controller (22 m versus 15 m). Our results demonstrate that perceptually motivated dynamic redirected walking techniques, in combination with reorientation techniques, allow for unaided exploration of a large virtual city model.

The aim of Redirected Walking (RDW) is to redirect a person along their path of travel in a Virtual Environment (VE) in order to increase the virtual space that can be explored in a given tracked area. Among other techniques, the user is redirected on a curved real-world path while visually walking straight in the VE (curvature gain). In this paper, we describe two experiments we conducted to test and extend RDW techniques. In Experiment 1, we measured the effect of walking speed on the detection threshold for curvature of the walking path. In a head-mounted display (HMD) VE, we found a decreased sensitivity for curvature for the slowest walking speed. When participants walked at 0.75 m/s, their detection threshold was approximately 0.1m-1(radius of approximately 10m). In contrast, for faster walking speeds (>;1.0m/s), we found a significantly lower detection threshold of approximately 0.036m-1(radius of approximately 27m). In Experiment 2, we implemented many well known redirection techniques into one dynamic RDW application. We integrated a large virtual city model and investigated RDW for free exploration. Further, we implemented a dynamic RDW controller which made use of the results from Experiment 1 by dynamically adjusting the applied curvature gain depending on the actual walking velocity of the user. In addition, we investigated the possible role of avatars to slow the users down or make them rotate their heads while exploring. Both the dynamic curvature gain controller and the avatar controller were evaluated in Experiment 2. We measured the average distance that was walked before reaching the boundaries of the tracked area. The mean walked distance was significantly larger in the condition where the dynamic gain controller was applied. This distance increased from approximately 15m for static gains to approximately 22m for dynamic gains. This did not come at the cost of an increase in simulator sickness. Applying the avatar controller did reveal an effect on walking distance or simulator sickness.