IEEE VIS 2024 Content: V-Mail: 3D-Enabled Correspondence about Spatial Data on (Almost) All Your Devices

V-Mail: 3D-Enabled Correspondence about Spatial Data on (Almost) All Your Devices

Jung Who Nam -

Tobias Isenberg -

Daniel F. Keefe -

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DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3229017

Room: Bayshore V

2024-10-16T16:24:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-16T16:24:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
V-Mail is a framework of cross-platform applications, interactive techniques, and communication protocols for multi-person correspondence about spatial 3D datasets. It has three working platforms that demonstrate different storytelling fidelities of V-Mail: (bottom-left) anyone with a video player can at least passively view the story, including annotations made by others; (top-right) in the highest-fidelity case, the story unlocks data on a V-Mail server than can be loaded via a plugin for desktop-based visualization applications, where users can explore and annotate the 3D data more deeply; (bottom-right) the mobile client works as a custom video player with mechanisms for adding annotations.
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Keywords

Human-computer interaction, visualization of scientific 3D data, communication, storytelling, immersive analytics

Abstract

We present V-Mail, a framework of cross-platform applications, interactive techniques, and communication protocols for improved multi-person correspondence about spatial 3D datasets. Inspired by the daily use of e-mail, V-Mail seeks to enable a similar style of rapid, multi-person communication accessible on any device; however, it aims to do this in the new context of spatial 3D communication, where limited access to 3D graphics hardware typically prevents such communication. The approach integrates visual data storytelling with data exploration, spatial annotations, and animated transitions. V-Mail ``data stories'' are exported in a standard video file format to establish a common baseline level of access on (almost) any device. The V-Mail framework also includes a series of complementary client applications and plugins that enable different degrees of story co-authoring and data exploration, adjusted automatically to match the capabilities of various devices. A lightweight, phone-based V-Mail app makes it possible to annotate data by adding captions to the video. These spatial annotations are then immediately accessible to team members running high-end 3D graphics visualization systems that also include a V-Mail client, implemented as a plugin. Results and evaluation from applying V-Mail to assist communication within an interdisciplinary science team studying Antarctic ice sheets confirm the utility of the asynchronous, cross-platform collaborative framework while also highlighting some current limitations and opportunities for future work.