Printmaking, Puzzles, and Studio Closets: Using Artistic Metaphors to Reimagine the User Interface for Designing Immersive Visualizations
This addresses the challenge for artists to engage with complex scientific data without programming skills, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visual programming and metaphor-based interfaces.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling artists to design immersive 3D multivariate data visualizations by developing an interface that uses artistic metaphors like printmaking and puzzles to simplify technical aspects, resulting in a web-based tool accessible with familiar devices for VR/AR environments.
We, as a society, need artists to help us interpret and explain science, but what does an artist's studio look like when today's science is built upon the language of large, increasingly complex data? This paper presents a data visualization design interface that lifts the barriers for artists to engage with actively studied, 3D multivariate datasets. To accomplish this, the interface must weave together the need for creative artistic processes and the challenging constraints of real-time, data-driven 3D computer graphics. The result is an interface for a technical process, but technical in the way artistic printmaking is technical, not in the sense of computer scripting and programming. Using metaphor, computer graphics algorithms and shader program parameters are reimagined as tools in an artist's printmaking studio. These artistic metaphors and language are merged with a puzzle-piece approach to visual programming and matching iconography. Finally, artists access the interface using a web browser, making it possible to design immersive multivariate data visualizations that can be displayed in VR and AR environments using familiar drawing tablets and touch screens. We report on insights from the interdisciplinary design of the interface and early feedback from artists.