IEEE VIS 2024 Content: WonderFlow: Narration-Centric Design of Animated Data Videos

WonderFlow: Narration-Centric Design of Animated Data Videos

Yun Wang -

Leixian Shen -

Zhengxin You -

Xinhuan Shu -

Bongshin Lee -

John Thompson -

Haidong Zhang -

Dongmei Zhang -

DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3411575

Room: Bayshore V

2024-10-17T16:36:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-17T16:36:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
User interface of WonderFlow. Users can first select the text phrases in the narration editor (a) and visual elements from the canvas (b) to form text-visual links. Then they can apply an animation preset selected in the animation effect panel (c) to the visual elements. WonderFlow then generates a narration-animation pack on the timeline (d).
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Keywords

Data video, Data visualization, Narration-animation interplay, Storytelling, Authoring tool

Abstract

Creating an animated data video with audio narration is a time-consuming and complex task that requires expertise. It involves designing complex animations, turning written scripts into audio narrations, and synchronizing visual changes with the narrations. This paper presents WonderFlow, an interactive authoring tool, that facilitates narration-centric design of animated data videos. WonderFlow allows authors to easily specify semantic links between text and the corresponding chart elements. Then it automatically generates audio narration by leveraging text-to-speech techniques and aligns the narration with an animation. WonderFlow provides a structure-aware animation library designed to ease chart animation creation, enabling authors to apply pre-designed animation effects to common visualization components. Additionally, authors can preview and refine their data videos within the same system, without having to switch between different creation tools. A series of evaluation results confirmed that WonderFlow is easy to use and simplifies the creation of data videos with narration-animation interplay.