Deimos: A Grammar of Dynamic Embodied Immersive Visualisation Morphs and Transitions

Authors. Benjamin Lee, Arvind Satyanarayan, Maxime Cordeil, Arnaud Prouzeau, Bernhard Jenny, Tim Dwyer

Venue. CHI (2023) Full Paper

Type. Full Paper

Materials. DOI ACM PDF video supplemental

Abstract. We present Deimos, a grammar for specifying dynamic embodied immersive visualisation morphs and transitions. A morph is a collection of animated transitions that are dynamically applied to immersive visualisations at runtime and is conceptually modelled as a state machine. It is comprised of state, transition, and signal specifications. States in a morph are used to generate animation keyframes, with transitions connecting two states together. A transition is controlled by signals, which are composable data streams that can be used to enable embodied interaction techniques. Morphs allow immersive representations of data to transform and change shape through user interaction, facilitating the embodied cognition process. We demonstrate the expressivity of Deimos in an example gallery and evaluate its usability in an expert user study of six immersive analytics researchers. Participants found the grammar to be powerful and expressive, and showed interest in drawing upon Deimos’ concepts and ideas in their own research.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3544548.3580754,
    title        = {Deimos: A Grammar of Dynamic Embodied Immersive Visualisation Morphs and Transitions},
    author       = {Lee, Benjamin and Satyanarayan, Arvind and Cordeil, Maxime and Prouzeau, Arnaud and Jenny, Bernhard and Dwyer, Tim},
    year         = {2023},
    booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
    publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    series       = {CHI '23},
    doi          = {10.1145/3544548.3580754},
    url          = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580754},
    abstract     = {We present Deimos, a grammar for specifying dynamic embodied immersive visualisation morphs and transitions. A morph is a collection of animated transitions that are dynamically applied to immersive visualisations at runtime and is conceptually modelled as a state machine. It is comprised of state, transition, and signal specifications. States in a morph are used to generate animation keyframes, with transitions connecting two states together. A transition is controlled by signals, which are composable data streams that can be used to enable embodied interaction techniques. Morphs allow immersive representations of data to transform and change shape through user interaction, facilitating the embodied cognition process. We demonstrate the expressivity of Deimos in an example gallery and evaluate its usability in an expert user study of six immersive analytics researchers. Participants found the grammar to be powerful and expressive, and showed interest in drawing upon Deimos' concepts and ideas in their own research.},
    articleno    = {810},
    numpages     = {18},
    keywords     = {grammar, user study, data visualisation, Immersive Analytics, embodied interaction, animated transitions}
}