Project Description

You will choose an application area and set of tasks and implement a visualization technique or system of your own. You may use any existing components or toolkits to help you build your system. The language and platform is also up to you.

Overview

• May 17 - Project summary + meeting due
• May 24 - Project proposal due
• Jun 14 - Project update + meeting
• Jun 27 - Final report due
• Jun 27 - Final project presentations

• Technique project: You will choose a visualization technique and a number of approaches and compare the advantages and disadvantages. You may use any existing components or toolkits to help you build your system. The language and platform is also up to you.
• System project: The goal is to help solve a visualization problem for a particular application by creating a visualization system for the given problem. This could be a scientific task or a visualization of your favorite data set to gain insight.

Marking

Project Summary (due May 17)

I'd also suggest to not worry about any software systems to use until you have a clear understanding what visualization problem you are trying to tackle. What are the requirements and what are the expected outcomes? What user interaction will be required? Only after you have a clear understanding of the visualization issues, only then go and figure out which tools might be best suited to help you accomplish these set goals. Sometimes no single tool will accomplish what you need and you either have to pipeline different tools together or write custom code to extend a particular tool.

Prepare a webpage with the following information and email me the link:

• Names and email addresses of the members of your group
• Description of the target application, dataset, users, and task(s).
  • These descriptions should be detailed and specific. Give specific examples of user goals and the information & interactions the visualization tool must support in order to achieve those goals.
  • Explain why these goals are hard to accomplish with existing standard tools.
• Brief description of your proposed solution.
  • At this stage just a short description and/or simple sketch is fine. You will develop this more for the proposal.
• Expertise of the group members
• Your level of experience or knowledge of the application area and the type of development / languages / toolkits you think will be required. If you have no experience this is fine! This section is to help me assess whether the scope of the project is reasonable for your team.

Proposal (due May 24)

• Expand on your proposed visualization solution.
  • Provide detailed illustrations of what the interface will look like and how the user will interact with it (e.g. think of a storyboard). You may either draw these by hand or use a computer drawing program.
• Present a scenario of use, using sketches and text to demonstrate how the user accomplishes a specific task with your tool.
  • The first step here is to make your tasks much more detailed and specific. Create a fictitious user and describe a specific problem they have.
  • A scenario then spells out what a user would have to do and what he or she would see step-by-step in performing a task using a given system. The key distinction between a scenario and a task is that a scenario is design-specific, in that it shows how a task would be performed if you adopt a particular design, while the task itself is design-independent: it's something the user wants to do regardless of what design is chosen.
• Implementation details.
  • Brief description of the language, platform, and any toolkit(s) you plan to use, and reasons for these choices.
• Milestones that break down the work into smaller parts.
• Include a description of each project milestone with start / end dates and who will be assigned to accomplish each milestone.
• These should be detailed enough that you know if the amount of work you are proposing is reasonable.
• A list of references (books, papers, software tools), that you draw upon.

Update (due Jun 14)

• Very brief reminder of your problem
• Images showing your current visualization design
• Any changes to the original visualization design or work plan
• Progress so far
• Current major challenges or problems

Final Report

The final report should be a stand-alone document describing your complete project. You should assume the reader has no prior knowledge of your project and has not read your proposal. Include the following information in your report:

• Motivation
  • Background information about the problem, tasks, users, and data
• Related work
  • Other visualization solutions to this problem or similar problems
  • Any previous visualization ideas that you incorporated into your solution
• Approach
  • Description of your visualization design
  • Reasons for your design choices
• Implementation
  • Brief description of how the system was implemented (toolkits, languages, platforms)
  • Any serious implementation challenges you encountered and how you handled them
• Results
  • Scenario(s) of use, including screen shots of the system being used
  • Performance of the system
  • Feedback from the evaluations about the design and functionality of your tool.
• Discussion
  • Strengths and weaknesses of your approach and implementation
  • Lessons you learned
• References

Final Presentations - Jun 27, place TBA

Interested people from outside the class will be invited so you should expect a few members of the audience who have never seen your project idea. Give a complete description of your project, including the problem, approach, results, and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses. Focus more on the results and analysis since most of the audience will have seen your proposal and update. Demonstrate how your software works through screen shots or a live demo. (If you choose to do a live demo, make sure you have screen shots available as a back-up in case something goes wrong.) Leave a bit of time at the end for audience questions.

Projects from other courses

• UVic 2010
• UBC 2009
• UBC 2007
• UVic 2006
• UBC 2006
• UBC 2004 Fall
• UBC 2004 Spring
• UBC 2003
• Berkeley 2002
• Virginia 2001