The future advent of ultra-high-resolution display technology has the potential to open up powerful new possibilities for information visualization. In the past, data quantity and complexity have grown much more rapidly than display capability, placing severe constraints on visualization design and forcing information visualization research to focus on a paradigm of highly aggregated overviews with details of only a small number of data items. An impending 100x increase in display capability has the potential to enable the simultaneous multi-scale visualization of vast and detailed information spaces. But current uses of high-resolution displays for visualization are rudimentary, with researchers focusing primarily on the computational aspects of graphics rendering. To take full advantage of the new possibilities, fundamentally different approaches to information visualization will have to be developed. In this project the PI will explore, through rigorous scientific experimentation and comparative analysis, the HCI aspects of interactive information visualization on ultra-high-resolution displays, with a view to both truly enabling the high-resolution revolution, and to determining if there should indeed be a revolution at all. Previously awarded NSF research infrastructure funding has enabled the PI to construct one of the highest resolution display facilities in the world. Taking advantage of that platform, the PI will collaborate with life scientists who work in an information-rich area of the bioinformatics domain in which there is a desperate need for improved exploration of massive data, along two major thrusts. Basic research will identify and quantify the fundamental capabilities, benefits, and value of high-resolution visualization, by exploring the task and parameter space of high-resolution displays to identify optimal configurations and evaluate human abilities for perceiving large quantities of high-resolution, multi-scale information. Applied research will design and evaluate new high-resolution interactive information visualization techniques, to identify the most effective approaches for exploiting the increased display space. An important project outcome will be baseline scientific data describing the effect of various display issues such as resolution, display size, bezels, and information display techniques on perception, cognition, user performance, and user behavior. Another outcome will be fundamental new techniques for high-resolution information visualizations that are demonstrably more scalable than traditional low-resolution counterparts.
Broader Impacts: This project will spur development of a new research area at the intersection of HCI, massive data visualization, and high-resolution display technology. Through development of advanced bioinformatics tools, it will directly impact cutting-edge research in the life sciences. In the longer term, it will guide future industry development of ultra-high-resolution form factors and advanced visualization tools for massive data, which will result in fundamental new data analysis capabilities across a broad range of application domains such as the sciences, command and control, infrastructure management, and the intelligence community.
