Revealing the Invisible: Visualizing the Location and Event Flow of Distributed Physical Devices

Marquardt, N., Gross, T., Carpendale, S. and Greenberg, S. (2010)
Revealing the Invisible: Visualizing the Location and Event Flow of Distributed Physical Devices. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction - TEI'10. (Cambridge, MA, USA), ACM Press, 8 pages, January 25-27. In Press. Video to be posted shortly. Earlier version as: Report 2009-938-17.

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Abstract

sensors, actuators and other devices attached to a variety of computers in different locations. Developing such systems is no easy task. It is hard to track the location and status of component devices, even harder to understand, validate, test and debug how events are transmitted between devices, and hardest yet to see if the overall system behaves correctly. Our Visual Environment Explorer supports developers of these systems by visualizing the location and status of individual and/or aggregate devices, and the event flow between them. It visualizes the current event flow between devices as they are received and transmitted, as well as the event history. Events are displayable at various levels of detail. The visualization also shows the activity of applications that use these physical devices. The tool is highly interactive: developers can explore system behavior through spatial navigation, zooming, multiple simultaneous views, event filtering, details-on-demand, and timedependent semantic zooming

Keywords

Event flow visualization, prototyping, physical and tangible interfaces, geographical map overlays, distributed systems

Bibtex entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { 2010-RevealingTheInvisible.TEI,
CLASS = { CONFARTICLE },
AUTHOR = { Marquardt, N. and Gross, T. and Carpendale, S. and Greenberg, S. },
TITLE = { Revealing the Invisible: Visualizing the Location and Event Flow of Distributed Physical Devices },
BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction - TEI'10 },
YEAR = { 2010 },
MONTH = { January 25-27 },
ADDRESS = { Cambridge, MA, USA },
PAGES = { 8 pages },
PUBLISHER = { ACM Press },
NOTE = { In Press. Video to be posted shortly. Earlier version as: Report 2009-938-17 },
KEYWORDS = { Event flow visualization, prototyping, physical and tangible interfaces, geographical map overlays, distributed systems },
}