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Now showing 1 - 10 of 19
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    Incorporating Visualization Research in Introductory Programming Course: Case Studies
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Kim, Sunghee; Post, Frits and Žára, Jirí
    The importance of early research experience for undergraduate students has been stressed time and time again. This paper presents three case studies in which non-CS major students could gain a visualization research experience in their first programming course. In all case studies, students were given real climate data to visualize. In the first case study, students visualized spatial correlation between two variables (weather conditions) on a map so that viewers could infer areas in which the two variables were highly correlated in a positive or negative way, or areas with little to no correlation. In the second and third case studies, students generated single variable visualization and multidimensional visualization of two or four variables. In each of the three case studies the students were led through the process of understanding data, exploring different representations, and designing and implementing an agreed-upon visual representation. Increased number of students decided to take the next course in Computer Science compared to previous years without a research project. Feedback from the students suggests that they enjoyed using data they could understand and found the process and the final product rewarding and applicable to projects in their major and courses.
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    Asteroid Escape: A Serious Game to Foster Teamwork Abilities
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Pratticò, Filippo Gabriele; Strada, Francesco; Lamberti, Fabrizio; Bottino, Andrea; Cignoni, Paolo and Miguel, Eder
    Teamwork skills have become a fundamental asset in the labor market. Modern organizations are increasingly implementing team building activities, aimed to improve or assess their employees' skills. Research suggests that serious games could be promising tools capable to support the creation of engaging and effective team building experiences. However, the design and development of serious games targeting these activities is still sparse and requires further investigation. This work introduces Asteroid Escape, an immersive serious game for team building, whose design was based on theoretical models on teamwork effectiveness. Although conducted on a restricted user sample, preliminary experiments suggest that tools like the devised one could positively contribute to ongoing research and implementation efforts targeting the exploitation of technology-enhanced learning methods for the development of teamwork skills and, more in general, of so-called soft skills.
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    Image-Based Information Visualization Tutorial
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Hurter, Christophe; Ritschel, Tobias and Telea, Alexandru
    While many data exploration techniques are based on automatic knowledge extraction, other tools exist where the user plays the central role. This tutorial will report actual use-cases where the user interactively explores datasets and extracts relevant information. These techniques must be interactive enough to insure flexibility data exploration, therefore image-based algorithms propose a suitable solution. These algorithms, processed in parallel by the graphic card, are fast and scalable enough to support interactive big data exploration requirements.
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    Integrating Visualization Literacy into Computer Graphics Education Using the Example of Dear Data
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Krekhov, Andrey; Michalski, Michael; Krüger, Jens; Tarini, Marco and Galin, Eric
    The amount of visual communication we are facing is rapidly increasing, and skills to process, understand, and generate visual representations are in high demand. Especially students focusing on computer graphics and visualization can benefit from a more diverse education on visual literacy, as they often have to work on graphical representations for broad masses after their graduation. Our proposed teaching approach incorporates basic design thinking principles into traditional visualization and graphics education. Our course was inspired by the book Dear Data that was the subject of a lively discussion at the closing capstone of IEEE VIS 2017. The paper outlines our 12-week teaching experiment and summarizes the results extracted from accompanying questionnaires and interviews. In particular, we provide insights into the creation process and pain points of visualization novices, discuss the observed interplay between visualization tasks and design thinking, and finally draw design implications for visual literacy education in general.
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    Treemap Literacy: A Classroom-Based Investigation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Firat, Elif E.; Denisova, Alena; Laramee, Robert S.; Romero, Mario and Sousa Santos, Beatrice
    Visualization literacy, the ability to interpret and understand visual designs, has gained momentum in the educational and information visualization communities. The goal of this research is to identify and address barriers to treemap literacy - a popular visual design, with a view to improve a non-expert user's treemap visualization literacy skills. In this paper we present the results of two years of an information visualization assignment, which are used to identify the barriers to and challenges of understanding and creating treemaps. From this, we develop a treemap visualization literacy test. Then, we propose a pedagogical tool that facilitates both teaching and learning of treemaps and advances treemap visualization literacy. To investigate the efficiency of this educational software, we then conduct a classroom-based study with 25 participants. We identify the properties of treemaps that can hinder literacy and cognition based on the results from the treemap visualization literacy test. Results also provide further support for the use of our tool that had a positive effect on treemap literacy skills of university students.
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    Bridging the Distance in Education: Design and Implementation of a Synchronous, Browser-Based VR Remote Teaching Tool
    (The Eurographics Association, 2024) Pehlic, Abdulmelik; Augsdörfer, Ursula; Sousa Santos, Beatriz; Anderson, Eike
    The rapid shift to remote education has presented numerous challenges for educators and students alike. Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a promising solution, offering immersive and interactive learning experiences. We design and implement a synchronous, browser-based VR teaching tool. The tool is compatible with budget VR equipment and enables meaningful engagement between teachers and students in a virtual setting, as well as active participation and interaction across a range of platforms, thus solving a range of disadvantages of current approaches.
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    A Projection Mapping System onto a Human Body for Medical Applications
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Fukuhara, Ryo; Kaneda, Kazufumi; Tamaki, Toru; Raytchev, Bisser; Higaki, Toru; Nishimoto, Soh; Sotsuka, Yohei; Fusiello, Andrea and Bimber, Oliver
    In breast reconstructive surgery where patient's abdominal fat and blood vessels are transplanted to the breast, it is very important to identify the course of the blood vessels inside the abdomen. In this paper, we propose a system for projecting blood vessels extracted from computer tomography angiography (CTA) on a patient's abdominal surface to support the breast reconstructive surgery. The proposed system detects the position and orientation of a projector automatically using an image captured by a camera mounted with the projector and is able to project the exact course of the blood vessels onto an abdominal skin from an arbitrary direction. An experiment using an abdominal model fabricated from patient's CTA data with a 3D printer demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed system.
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    Investigating Different Augmented Reality Approaches in Circuit Assembly: a User Study
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Marques, Bernardo; Esteves, Rafael; Alves, João; Ferreira, Carlos; Dias, Paulo; Santos, Beatriz Sousa; Cignoni, Paolo and Miguel, Eder
    Augmented Reality (AR) has been considered as having great potential in assisting performance and training of complex tasks. Assembling electronic circuits is such a task, since many errors may occur, as wrong choice or positioning of components or incorrect wiring and thus using AR approaches may be beneficial. This paper describes a controlled experiment aimed at comparing usability and acceptance of two AR-based approaches (one based on a single device and another approach using two interconnected devices), with a traditional approach using a paper manual in the assembly of an electronic circuit. Participants were significantly faster and made fewer errors while using the AR approaches, and most preferred the multi-device approach.
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    Cytosplore: Interactive Visual Single-Cell Profiling of the Immune System
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Höllt, Thomas; Pezzotti, Nicola; van Unen, Vincent; Li, Na; Koning, Frits; Eisemann, Elmar; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn P. F.; Vilanova, Anna; Bruckner, Stefan and Oeltze-Jafra, Steffen
    Recent advances in single-cell acquisition technology have led to a shift towards single-cell analysis in many fields of biology. In immunology, detailed knowledge of the cellular composition is of interest, as it can be the cause of deregulated immune responses, which cause diseases. Similarly, vaccination is based on triggering proper immune responses; however, many vaccines are ineffective or only work properly in a subset of those who are vaccinated. Identifying differences in the cellular composition of the immune system in such cases can lead to more precise treatment. Cytosplore is an integrated, interactive visual analysis framework for the exploration of large single-cell datasets. We have developed Cytosplore in close collaboration with immunology researchers and several partners use the software in their daily workflow. Cytosplore enables efficient data analysis and has led to several discoveries alongside high-impact publications.
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    Visualization of Large Point Cloud in Unity
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Santana Núñez, José Miguel; Trujillo, Agustin; Ortega, Sebastián; Fusiello, Andrea and Bimber, Oliver
    Large point cloud rendering has become a very relevant topic on 3D graphics as scanners and other sources of 3D point data are nowadays available to companies and the general public. In this project, we propose an implementation of a point cloud viewer, designed for the full-detail visualization of virtually unlimited point clouds for their inspection on short ranges. This work presents the data structure and the LoD technique to achieve a real-time rendering of the model, making emphasis on the details of an initial prototype based on Unity.