Slicing the Aurora: An Immersive Proxemics-Aware Visualization

International audience The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights is a phenomenon that has fascinated people throughout history. The AuroraMAX outreach initiative provides a collection of time-lapse videos of the night sky captured by a camera at Yellowknife in Canada. We present an interactive visualiz...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Companion on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces
Main Authors: Lay, Sebastian, Vermeulen, Jo, Perin, Charles, Donovan, Eric, Dachselt, Raimund, Carpendale, Sheelagh
Other Authors: Technische Universität Dresden = Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden), University of Calgary
Format: Conference Object
Language:English
Published: HAL CCSD 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hal.science/hal-01618642
https://hal.science/hal-01618642/document
https://hal.science/hal-01618642/file/2016_ISS_workshop_immersive_auroravis.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1145/3009939.3009954
Description
Summary:International audience The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights is a phenomenon that has fascinated people throughout history. The AuroraMAX outreach initiative provides a collection of time-lapse videos of the night sky captured by a camera at Yellowknife in Canada. We present an interactive visualization of this AuroraMAX image data on a large touch display. Our visualization slices each time-lapse video to represent an entire night as a single image or keogram, provides different views on the keograms, and allows people to explore and compare nights to discover interesting patterns. To entice people to interact, we use proxemic interaction and animate the visualization in response to people's movements in front of the display. We deployed the visualization in a public space at an art-science festival. Initial findings suggest that the proxemic interaction aspect helps to draw people in and that the visualization generates interest from passersby, providing opportunities for science outreach.