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greater chance of interaction and group insight. The visualizations do need to be presented
correctly as optical illusions seen by one member of the group are likely to be seen be them all.
11.4.3 Telling a 'story'
An important point is that all of the modes should start with some hypothesis and create
a 'story' that describes the visualization. There should always be a story to tell even if it is
one of explorations in content, and this needs to be incorporated within the visualization.
We started saying that 'visualizations need a 1000 words to describe them', and the original
reference by Hewitt
et al.
(2006) described within a long paper a complete product range
using seven different examples, each having a visualization of the problem, as well as a
complete textual description defining both the methods and the findings. It is likely that
without these descriptions we are just left with inspirational visualizations of nothing.
The final stage, which is possibly the most important one, is how to fully document
a visualization which will include all parts of the process including the 'story' and the
interpretations that were involved. This we are not going to cover in detail here, but there
are some experiences and standards from other communities that should be considered.
Documentation of visualizations from the scientific viewpoint has been described through
meta-data inspired by Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila's (2001) Semantic Web and De
Roure and Sure's (2006) Semantic Grid ideas. Both of these processes aim to record each
step of the scientific data capture and workflow analysis that a user takes. This would allow
systems and experiments to be repeated and reinterpretations made. An alternative set of
standards for interpreted data for architectural visualization has been considered within
The London Charter (Beacham, Denard and Niccolucci, 2006). This defines, as well as the
meta-data involved, the subjective decisions that have been taken to create visualizations and
has been termed para-data. The charter covers eight internationally recognized principles
for disseminating three-dimensional data to the community.
11.5 The future - a better and cheaper place
The current generation of video conferencing system, called the Access Grid, is based upon
the idea of a grid of people interacting and assimilating information in a similar manner
to a Grid of computers. The success of this has come from available increased networking
bandwidth, meaning that in the UK alone there are over 200 specialist large purpose-built
rooms (similar to the one in Figure 11.10), and worldwide over 20 000 licences for the
desktop software have been issued (Access Grid Support Centre, 2006 and 2007).
We have shown in this chapter how visualization is not just about the equipment and pre-
sentation devices but, importantly, about the human visual system, the modes of interaction
and a reminder that it is a way of telling a story. As computer components and networking
have become cheaper, the technical and presentational issues are slowly being addressed. The
future should consider a new form of grid visualization systems that constitute a network
of human visual systems, and provides a convenient means for them to interact and debate.
This should adhere to continual best practice, but then new stories may be told and come
from large global interactions.
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