Perception! Immersion! Empowerment!
Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization

Visualization has helped people in their daily life by making them more efficient and effective for understanding and analyzing data. The research paper is about finding ideas that will improve visualization and help people extend their abilities through system design into epistemic abilities. By epistemic ability, they mean knowledge-related ability like a superhero has in fictional narrative history, that can see through things, understand the phenomena, and predict future events. The blog I am writing aims to inspire the visualization community to build new visualization techniques and systems.

We are living in a digital era therefore we have had the chance to see a lot of interactive systems which are inspired by fictional superpowers or are experienced as a superpower by the people using them. An example is a VR system proposed by Ishibashi et al which is a system combined with a pulling force-feedback device that allows players to become Spider-Man and experience swinging through the air on elastic webs. Another discovery was the superpower glass system based on Google Glass which detects emotions to help people on the autism spectrum to develop emotional awareness. These systems focus on pragmatic empowerment, as you notice the usage of superpower metaphors, firstly encouraging the design and then building the precise user interface. What if we focus on epistemic empowerment by allowing people to gain knowledge about the world without necessarily changing it?

To find the answers the researchers listed distinct superhuman abilities from fiction by looking at :

• Which aspects of human abilities do they amplify?
• In what contexts and situations do characters use the abilities?
• How do characters control their abilities?
• How the ability is visually portrayed in print and other media?

After spending a year exploring fictional superpowers and discussing empowerment in visualization, they were able to build a framework that highlights seven fundamental mechanisms that represent opportunities for new visualization systems.

→ Enhanced Vision

Seeing through occlusions and objects is an ability that some fictional characters from Marvel or Harry Potter have, and also humans in the real world have tried to make it possible by inventing devices like telescopes, optical tools, and x-ray apparatus, that can occlude the objects directly in the person’s physical surrounding by using computer modeling. The suggestion from the researchers is to build visualization systems upon the metaphor of enhanced vision both literally and figuratively. For example, creating a new ability like building vision, that can allow people to see what objects surround them, what temperature or other characteristics they have in real-time, by building a 3D model.

→ Visual Synesthesia

Helps in translating non-visual properties like sound, affect, the chemical composition into a visual form by facilitating the service you need. An example is a device that measures air quality and reflects the visualized data to you. Suggestions from the research would be to enable “emotions vision” that helps to see the changes in people’s moods. This can be helpful during a presentation to adapt to the audience’s response.

→ Enhanced Attention

Allows identifying important, small details that are usually missed by the human eye. Characters like detective Sherlock Holmes or Spider-Man have this ability that helps them to quickly find threats. Future visualization tools can help people to filter out noise in their data and environment. For example, building an “acceleration vision” system to integrate into a car’s windscreen could visualize changes in acceleration of other vehicles that are unexpected.

→ Enhanced Numeracy

Ability to make measurements with a large set of data. Fiction characters like Daredevil can count bullets even though distracted, and Jason Bourne can estimate the weight of other people. So do we as humans by using the right tools like the RealitySketch application we can measure the length, distance, and angle of objects around us in real-time. In the future, we can have “estimation vision” tools that will help people to make judgments like comparing several people by heights, clothes, or other attributes virtually or even “counting vision” tools that can help the teacher to count members of a class and keep track of them.

→ Enhanced Recall

Is the ability to recall past observations through memory, and connect with the new ones. Humans can easily do that by bringing visions that have remarked on their past. Meanwhile, in science fiction movies this ability is illustrated by visualizing flashbacks or describing a dialogue between characters without any image or video illustration. Future seems promising for this ability as we can add here “patient vision” tools that provide doctors with a visualized summary of the past patients visiting during consultations. This can be applied to other fields too that need to visualize, summarize and relieve experience by digging deeper into that.

→ Enhanced Comparison

Ability to compare phenomena by distinguishing similarities and differences. An example is the Daredevil character that could distinguish twins far away from them based on their smell. In the future, there may be tools that rearrange virtual copies of real-world objects to make their sizes, volumes, and other characteristics easily to compare.

→ Enhanced Prediction

Ability to predict an event in the future based on past observations. Is usually visualized by showing possible outcomes in sequential or parallel order, but sometimes it depends on the phenomena you are predicting. Some epistemic tools in the real world that use this ability are weather forecasts and route or trip planners apps. The researchers suggested that in the future prediction would also help solve daily life issues like queues in the supermarket. Building a “queue vision” tool might allow to count the people in each queue at the supermarket checkout and predict in real-time which will move fastest.

All these mechanisms can be combined into seven dimensions of empowerment to help realize the goals.

→ Scope

The broader the usage of the tool is, the more empowering it is. An example is the difference between touristic binoculars which has fixed position and can be viewed at specific points and portable binoculars which can be used in many settings. Talking about visualization usually the scope is limited by the technical challenges of capturing and displaying data.

→ Access

It refers to the number of agents that can use the epistemic tool. If the tool is easily distributed or used remotely then has higher access than other tools which exist in a specific location. Related to visualization this dimension is helping empowerment as the latest technologies of the internet, and mobile devices have wider access. However, it is limited by the complexity and cost of technology.

→ Spatial Relevance

Reflects the distance between the location where information is most useful to the person, and the location where that information is displayed. The closer the relationship between information and environment the more empowering is the tool. An example is a thermal camera that visualizes the temperature based on a specific distance, however, it depends on the purpose of the tool because it can have a high range distance and still shows the right visualization like ultrasound imaging equipment.

→ Temporal Relevance

Describes the relationship between the moment the information is delivered to the person and the moment that would be most useful for them to have the information. It depends on the tool, an example is the livestock market that needs to have higher temporal relevance than a daily notification for the same information. Some businesses are focusing on visualizing dashboards with real-time data, others don’t find it useful as intend to focus on visualizing past data. Having high temporal relevance not only empowers the tool but can also enhance predicting too.

→ Information Richness

The higher the information richness of an epistemic tool, the more empowering it is. Richness depends on the quantity of data if is large enough to conclude, the variety if is accessible in more than one format, and also how accurate that information is. Usually, basic tools visualize information for one type of phenomenon like thermoscopes showing temperature, but with the advancement of technology, we have more abstract data that needs agnostic tools to visualize the data.

→ Degree Of Control

This refers to how much control a person can have over an epistemic tool. If the tool has to be configurable from other agents, and can’t be tuned then has less empowering than the others that allow direct, interactive manipulation. In real-word visualization tools provides extremely limited control like oscilloscopes that have many features but as is high impacted is frequently controlled. Even lately some tools like RealitySketch have begun to explore opportunities to empower people with a powerful sense of control.

→ Environmental Reality

Measures if the tool is operating in a real or virtual environment. The ones that work in the real works are more empowering as actions tend to be more long-lasting than virtual ones. For example, a VR can let people explore real locations and have more empowerment than a VR that offers a virtual visit to a non-existing place. Building 3D images, a video may be helpful for game players but it distances them from reality. There are also inventions like drones and robot swarms that offer visualization and empower people via increasingly real-world interfaces.

Conclusions

In conclusion by analyzing existing visualization tools, and superpowers from fictional characters the researchers were able to suggest a diversity of new applications for visualization techniques. As the visualization community still lacks a concrete theoretical framework for characterizing ways in which visualization can provide value, specifying the dimensions of empowerment could serve as a starting point for a broader framing and also suggest new approaches for evaluating the benefits of visualizations. As the inspiration for new visualization tools were fiction characters among them are also those who have a negative attitude, so we should be careful about what we consider right to do. Even if the mentioned examples were in positive perspective some of them like “emotion” or “building” vision may be interpreted as surveillance or control tools. As future visualization tools may empower everyone we should require a deeper consideration of equity, fairness, and accessibility.

This post is based on the IEEE VIS 2021 paper by Wesley Willett, Bon Adriel Aseniero, Sheelagh Carpendale, Pierre Dragicevic, Yvonne Jansen, Lora Oehlberg, and Petra Isenberg. Perception! Immersion! Empowerment! Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2021).