026  |  Visualization Beyond the Desktop w/ Petra Isenberg

Hi Folks!

We are back after a relaxing summer with a brand new episode! We have Petra Isenberg, from the Aviz team at INRIA (we’ve had other guests from the same lab in the past) to talk about visualization on non-standard devices and environments. Yes, stuff like display walls, surfaces, tabletops, and people collaborating around them. It feels like the future is here and there’s a ton of potentially interesting applications for visualization!

Petra gives us hints about what works and what does not work, what the research says, what has been tried already, and what needs to be explored, etc. She also gives practical recommendations at the end about how to start doing visualization on these devices. Really cool stuff!

Take care,
Enrico & Mo.

Chapters

  • 00:00 Back from summer break
  • 02:41 Our guest today: Petra Isenberg
  • 05:59 Moving beyond the desktop
  • 11:55 New challenges in collaborative settings
  • 22:25 Interactions with very large screens
  • 38:14 Practical use and how to get started
  • 48:53 More resources

Links and papers:

Resource list from Petra

Research links:

Technology links:

Software frameworks/libraries for developing vis on surfaces:

  • Most Pixels Ever (Processing for very large wall displays – I forgot to mention this one during the podcast)
  • kivy (Python framework for developing multi-touch applications)
  • libavg (maintained by Ulrich von Zadow who has worked on several visualization + interactive surface installations)
  • ZVTM (Java toolkit for developing ZUIs, includes possibilities to run visualizations on a cluster)
  • Microsoft Surface SDK
  • (for mobile check out iOS and Android SDKs)