ILDA research themes

Novel Forms of Display for Groups and Individuals. Data sense-making and analysis is not limited to individual users working with a single device, but increasingly involves multiple users working together in a coordinated manner in multi-display environments: workstations, wall displays, handheld devices, mixed reality. We investigate how to empower users working with complex data by leveraging novel types of displays and combinations of displays, designing visualizations adapted to their capabilities.

Novel Forms of Input for Groups and Individuals. The contexts in which novel types of displays are used often call for novel types of input. We design and evaluate interaction techniques that take advantage of input technologies such as tactile surfaces, 3D motion trackers and custom physical controllers built on-demand. We investigate input techniques that feature a high level of expressive power, as well as techniques that improve group awareness and support strongly-coupled cooperative tasks.

Interacting with Diverse Data. Research in data management is yielding novel models that enable diverse structuring and querying strategies, give machine-processable semantics to the data and ease their interlinking. This, in turn, yields datasets that can be distributed at the scale of the Web, highly-heterogeneous and thus rich but also quite complex. We investigate ways to leverage this richness from the users’ perspective, designing interactive systems adapted to the specific characteristics of data models and data semantics of the considered application area.