Sensemaking Sans Power: Interactive Data Visualization Using Color-Changing Ink.

We present an approach for interactively visualizing data using color-changing inks without the need for electronic displays or computers. Color-changing inks are a family of physical inks that change their color characteristics in response to an external stimulus such as heat, UV light, water, and pressure. Visualizations created using color-changing inks can embed interactivity in printed material without external computational media. In this article, we survey current color-changing ink technology and then use these findings to derive a framework for how it can be used to construct interactive data representations. We also enumerate the interaction techniques possible using this technology. We then show some examples of how to use color-changing ink to create interactive visualizations on paper. While obviously limited in scope to situations where no power or computing is present, or as a complement to digital displays, our findings can be employed for paper, data physicalization, and embedded visualizations.

Towards Understanding Sensory Substitution for Accessible Visualization: An Interview Study.

For all its potential in supporting data analysis, particularly in exploratory situations, visualization also creates barriers: accessibility for blind and visually impaired individuals. Regardless of how effective a visualization is, providing equal access for blind users requires a paradigm shift for the visualization research community. To enact such a shift, it is not sufficient to treat visualization accessibility as merely another technical problem to overcome. Instead, supporting the millions of blind and visually impaired users around the world who have equally valid needs for data analysis as sighted individuals requires a respectful, equitable, and holistic approach that includes all users from the onset. In this paper, we draw on accessibility research methodologies to make inroads towards such an approach. We first identify the people who have specific insight into how blind people perceive the world: orientation and mobility (O&M) experts, who are instructors that teach blind individuals how to navigate the physical world using non-visual senses. We interview 10 O&M experts-all of them blind-to understand how best to use sensory substitution other than the visual sense for conveying spatial layouts. Finally, we investigate our qualitative findings using thematic analysis. While blind people in general tend to use both sound and touch to understand their surroundings, we focused on auditory affordances and how they can be used to make data visualizations accessible-using sonification and auralization. However, our experts recommended supporting a combination of senses-sound and touch-to make charts accessible as blind individuals may be more familiar with exploring tactile charts. We report results on both sound and touch affordances, and conclude by discussing implications for accessible visualization for blind individuals.

Information Olfactation: Harnessing Scent to Convey Data.

Olfactory feedback for analytical tasks is a virtually unexplored area in spite of the advantages it offers for information recall, feature identification, and location detection. Here we introduce the concept of information olfactation as the fragrant sibling of information visualization, and discuss how scent can be used to convey data. Building on a review of the human olfactory system and mirroring common visualization practice, we propose olfactory marks, the substrate in which they exist, and their olfactory channels that are available to designers. To exemplify this idea, we present VISCENT: A six-scent stereo olfactory display capable of conveying olfactory glyphs of varying temperature and direction, as well as a corresponding software system that integrates the display with a traditional visualization display. Finally, we present three applications that make use of the viScent system: A 2D graph visualization, a 2D line and point chart, and an immersive analytics graph visualization in 3D virtual reality. We close the paper with a review of possible extensions of viScent and applications of information olfactation for general visualization beyond the examples in this paper.