droidcon San Francisco 2019
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Building One of the World's Largest Interactive Data Visualisation Experiences
By
Supratim Chakraborty
droidcon San Francisco 2019
Have you wondered what would it be like to translate a traditional Android app experience to an 80-inch touch surface? In the process of making my data visualization tool VizInteract to work with large displays, I managed to find great insights and answers to the former question. Due to the need for vanilla AOSP to send a video stream and read sequential multi-touch events, a traditional Android Tablet with HDMI display out cannot serve the purpose. To solve this problem, we decided to use the Android-x86 project and an external Infrared touch screen overlay to run Oreo on a large display and support 12 touch points.
In this talk, I will share how I modified the Android-x86 kernel to add driver support for an IR touch overlay. I will share my learnings from building multi-touch experiences on unnaturally large surfaces and how that poses interesting challenges, especially for a data visualization tool. Most notably, what are the key changes in the UX of affording dragging, rotation, pinch to zoom and scale gestures on an 80-inch tablet vs a regular android tablet. Finally, I will explore the constraints of working with Canvas API and a large amount of numerical data processing.
Transcript
English
00:00
[Music]
00:11
hello everyone so kind of towards the
00:16
end of the conference so I guess we
00:19
gotta force a little bit of energy but
00:21
yeah this is a talk on interactive data
00:25
visualization experience that is a
00:27
research project that we built and the
00:29
name of the tool is within track and we
00:32
built it using Android canvas and
00:33
android x86 so this is a top primarily
00:36
going to be the learnings I had from
00:38
building this tool so a little bit about
00:41
myself
00:42
I started off with Java development in
00:46
consultancy then moved on to product
00:48
development for a small Android email
00:51
client by the name of Newton mail I
00:53
don't know if you've used it it's
00:54
available cross-platform used to be
00:56
called cloud magic so I worked as an
00:59
Android developer there did a little bit
01:01
of UX and moved into HCI research so and
01:04
I'm again back to using Android for my
01:06
research project so I guess
01:08
hence my connection with Android on the
01:12
side I also organize a Google developer
01:14
group for a small city outside Vancouver
01:17
it's called Surrey and yeah this
01:20
research project was funded by Wolfgang
01:23
shores linger under the Canada Research
01:25
Fund for interactive experiences and
01:29
he's a full professor who kind of free
01:32
does primary research is around visual
01:35
analytics and mixed reality so to kind
01:40
of give a little bit of context around
01:41
the the research aspect of our project
01:44
so the kind of like primary showcase for
01:48
our lab is this 8 into a 4k panel setup
01:53
that is the largest research set up of
01:56
its kind in North America and it's also
02:00
powering the visualization tool that you
02:03
see here it's called din space and this
02:06
is mostly your kind of like a
02:08
traditional visualization tool like
02:10
tableau or Excel any of those tools this
02:13
is more akin to that
02:15
we have your traditional mouse-based
02:18
interactions menus icons pointers all of
02:22
that but what we wanted to do was go
02:26
from there to building something much
02:27
more interactive and using gestures and
02:30
much more facilitated by touch
02:33
interactions so the primary goal was to
02:37
build an interactive data which I
02:39
visualized in tool for touch enabled
02:40
this place which use multi-touch
02:42
gestures and promote all kinds of data
02:45
exploration tasks so the first question
02:49
is of course why Android so the first
02:53
and primary goal was to support multiple
02:55
configurations we wanted to support VA
02:58
tasks all kinds of tasks like
03:01
visualization tasks of which involve
03:03
construction of charts filtering data
03:05
brushing and selection all of that but
03:08
from lower end devices right up to
03:11
higher end configurations so before I
03:15
actually talk about what what what I
03:18
learned by building this I'm going to
03:21
give a small sped up demo of all that's
03:23
possible on vision track right now so so
03:28
you have a canvas and that's the
03:31
interactive canvas you can load up the
03:32
files any kind of data file once you
03:35
load up you have the dimensions on the
03:37
left you drag the dimension onto the
03:39
canvas you create a frequency histogram
03:41
you can move and interact the
03:44
visualization pinch-to-zoom rotation and
03:47
the cool thing is if you bring two
03:49
visualizations together you can create a
03:52
parallel coordinate plot or if you
03:53
rotate and bring together you create a
03:56
scatter plot you can also break up the
03:58
visualizations using a flick gesture and
04:01
you have moving canvas it's all like
04:04
direct manipulation everything that we
04:06
can facilitate using direct manipulation
04:08
if you bring visualizations from the
04:10
sidebar and directly onto an existing
04:12
visualization you create a filter you
04:16
can duplicate filters you can remove
04:18
filters so I'm just kind of like a sped
04:22
up version of whatever is possible and
04:23
that in the tool you can also add
04:26
categorical filters not just numerical
04:29
this was the most coolest one I think
04:31
you can create a radar radar chart by
04:33
just having the visualizations oriented
04:36
as an axis and bringing it together
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