CoViz: Cooperative Visualization to Facilitate Sense Making by Groups of Users

Abstract

Coviz is a tool that uses visualization to support spontaneous construction, organization and exploration of collections. We use the term collection to identify a set of documents gathered for a given purpose by one or several individuals. Coviz facilitates creation, organization and update of collections by providing multi-scale visualization and interaction techniques. Coviz has been tested in several informative case studies involving small groups of users. In these situations, Coviz has fulfilled several important aspects of both groups and personal organization needs. Our initial experiments indicate that Coviz can even encourage unusual and interesting forms of cooperation among people.

Immersive visualization of geophysical data

“…Finally we noticed that distributed and/or co-located real time collaborative VR is necessary. This is certainly a complicated task that involves network communication and data sharing topics [2]. In our opinion it is the only valid option to circumvent the problems we had trying to share the VR experience with a HMD based system.…”

“…GOCAD [9] is one example of a once academic development in this field that has long since then become a commercial product. Due to the necessity for geological data visualization in geothermal, oil, gas or mining industries (among others) it is no wonder that commercial software solutions like CoViz [2] have long since taken the lead in that domain and are still being developed. Even though such software mostly includes modules that allow representing complex 3D data sets, including time-dependent information that can also be jointly interpreted, these solutions rarely offer support for VR technology.…”

Knowminer Search - A Multi-visualisation Collaborative Approach to Search Result Analysis

“…However, the provided interaction possibilities for search refinement within the visualisations are limited. Arnaud et al [2] provide a system for collaboratively organising, collecting and exploring sets of documents from different sources. In order to allow this, they use multi-scale visualisations providing automatic and interactive clustering.…”