Perception! Immersion! Empowerment! Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization

Abstract

We explore how the lens of fictional superpowers can help characterize how visualizations empower people and provide inspiration for new visualization systems. Researchers and practitioners often tout visualizations' ability to "make the invisible visible" and to "enhance cognitive abilities." Meanwhile superhero comics and other modern fiction often depict characters with similarly fantastic abilities that allow them to see and interpret the world in ways that transcend traditional human perception. We investigate the intersection of these domains, and show how the language of superpowers can be used to characterize existing visualization systems and suggest opportunities for new and empowering ones. We introduce two frameworks: The first characterizes seven underlying mechanisms that form the basis for a variety of visual superpowers portrayed in fiction. The second identifies seven ways in which visualization tools and interfaces can instill a sense of empowerment in the people who use them. Building on these observations, we illustrate a diverse set of "visualization superpowers" and highlight opportunities for the visualization community to create new systems and interactions that empower new experiences with data.Material and illustrations are available under CC-BY 4.0 at osf.io/8yhfz.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

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“…Situated visualisations are less represented in the literature. Recently, there has been some defining work that characterised the types of enhancements that immersive analytics may provide through enhanced vision and visual synesthesia [72]. Addressing the question of how situated visualisations might improve cognition is an ongoing research area.…”

“…Addressing the question of how situated visualisations might improve cognition is an ongoing research area. The supposition has been put forth that cognition may be improved by enhanced attention, enhanced numeracy, enhanced recall, enhanced comparison, and enhanced prediction [72]. Moreover, theoretical frameworks such as embodied, situated, and socially situated cognition support the idea that cognition is deeply rooted in its physical and social context [103][104][105].…”

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“…This metaphor is already used in video games (Fig. 10-left) and in some AR visualization prototypes [91]. Besides showing where people are situated, AR systems could use rich visual encodings to convey their physical and mental state, including whether they expe- rience pain or distress, and the intensity of those negative sensations.…”

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“…We could even combine real-time visualizations with a world-in-miniature [95] to facilitate navigation in a large area, such as drone navigation for search-and-rescue. We can take inspiration from existing immersive data analysis [70,113] or real-time embedded data visualization research [423,462,463] to better design such data-centric interfaces for AR-HRI. We encourage the researchers to start thinking about how we can apply these emerging data visualization practices for AR-HRI systems in the future.…”