Perception! Immersion! Empowerment! Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization Design
TL;DR: We often talk about visualizations as tools for amplifying cognition—but what if we took that analogy a bit further, looking to superhero comics and other science fiction as sources of inspiration for visualizations that can enhance human abilities in new and surprising ways? Based on a deep dive into perceptual and cognitive superpowers in fiction, we propose two ways of thinking about the relationship between these powers and visualization, and describe what it means for a visualization to feel empowering. We also illustrate a set of new “visualization superpowers” that highlight opportunities for new empowering data visualizations, as well as the challenges they must confront.
Enter a World Much Like our Own!
Visualization researchers and practitioners often talk about amplifying human cognition and abilities, and this theme of visualization as augmentation is widespread throughout the vis literature. Yet, the desire to enhance human perception, cognition, or experience isn’t unique to visualization at all. Fictional narratives in superhero comics, science fiction, and fantasy have long featured characters with abilities that allow them to see, reason about, and understand phenomena that are otherwise invisible.
Considering visualization through the language of superpowers can help us think about new opportunities for vis and what it means for a visualization to make us feel “empowered”. It also illustrates how the visualization community can look outward for new sources of inspiration, embracing design strategies like futuring that are increasingly common elsewhere, including in human-computer interaction and design. This discussion is particularly relevant now, as immersive analytics systems have begun to make it easier to visualize data in ways that are more deeply connected to the real world.
Into the Depths of the Comics Rack!
Our thinking about the connection between superpowers and vis began in 2018 at a joint Inria-Calgary workshop, where we considered a variety of ways in which situated visualizations could make information visible in the real world. Having just watched the most recent Avengers film, several of us immediately connected the visualization approaches we were discussing to fictional superheros whose abilities let them see and interpret those same kinds of information. That realization started us on a multi-year journey where we first examined and organized superpowers from the Fandom Superpowers wiki (a community-curated database of over 16,000 superpowers). We then looked at examples of fan-created and in-universe superpower taxonomies, as well as real-world systems that approximate some of these powers. Finally, we took a deep dive into the source material, reading a big stack of recent and vintage comics featuring superheros with vis-related abilities. All of this reflection ultimately led us to create a pair of frameworks, as well as a variety of new examples that highlight how superpowers in fiction can inspire new visualization research and systems.
The scope of all superpowers in fiction is extremely broad and the majority of powers tend to be pragmatic ones that let characters change the world around them—including physical enhancements like super-strength and matter manipulation or mental abilities like thought projection. We chose largely to ignore these, instead focusing on what we call epistemic superpowers—superhuman abilities that let characters gain knowledge of the world without necessarily altering it. Specifically, we consider epistemic abilities that are either visual (where characters see in enhanced ways) or that are illustrated visually in the source media, even if the powers themselves aren’t strictly visual.
But What is the Nature of our Hero’s Mysterious Abilities?
Our first framework attempts to capture low-level building blocks that underpin many different superpowers. These include abilities that enhance vision—including ones that increase humans’ ability to use their visual system to observe the surrounding world—as well as examples that enhance cognition and amplify humans’ capacity to process or reason about observations. We highlight seven different kinds of of enhancements—but this isn’t an exhaustive list. Instead, it’s meant to provide a starting point for discussing the fictional superpowers that are are most likely to inspire new visualization approaches.
These include enhanced vision approaches that let see people see through objects, in different wavelengths, or at extreme scales. These abilities are extremely popular in fiction, and in fact a number of real-world see-through vision systems already exist, including AR prototypes that support a variety of medical applications.
Meanwhile, visual synesthesia abilities translate non-visual phenomena, like sound or chemical composition, into visual ones. These include powers like the emotion vision of DC’s Black Lantern Corps. They also have analogues in research systems like White and Feiner’s SiteLens ,which included situated mixed-reality visualizations of air quality data.
Other abilities like enhanced numeracy and enhanced prediction allow wielders to compute exact counts and predictions in ways that typical humans can’t—abilities that recent systems like Suzuki et al.’s RealitySketch and Itoh et al.’s Laplacian Vision have also begun to explore.
Combinations of abilities are also possible, as illustrated by characters like Marvel’s Amadeus Cho who combines enhanced numeracy, comparison, and prediction to estimate and compare possible projectile trajectories.
Enter the Many Dimensions of Empowerment!
As we’ve seen, technologies that resemble many superpowers already exist. However, depending on how they are implemented, some systems create a much stronger sense of empowerment than others. With that in mind, our second framework highlights seven dimensions of empowerment: scope, access, spatial relevance, temporal relevance, information richness, degree of control, and environmental reality, exploring the ways in which each can alter people’s sense of empowerment or agency. We illustrate these dimensions by comparing well known epistemic tools—existing technological systems which augment humans’ ability to learn about the world.
For example, the scope of a tool determines the set of objects or settings where it will work. Often, the more versatile the scope, the more empowering a tool or system is. So, a pair of binoculars you can take with you is likely to be more empowering than a set that you can’t.
Similarly, access to a tool determines who can use it and how easily. Generally, tools or systems that have finite resources or are located at a single location (like an orbital space telescope) have lower access than tools that can be easily copied and distributed en-masse (like a smartphone camera).
The spatial relevance of a tool, meanwhile, reflects the real or perceived distance between where information is most useful to a person, and the place where that information is actually displayed. In general, tools and systems with greater spatial relevance (including mixed-reality vis systems) are more empowering if they can give people the ability to see and interpret information in places where it is easier for them to act on it.
Likewise, the temporal relevance of a tool reflects the amount of time between when information is delivered to a person, and the moment it would be the most useful to have that information. From this perspective, tools with low temporal relevance (like FMRI machines that can take hours to produce imagery) are less empowering than tools (like thermal cameras) that can provide information in real time to support immediate decisions.
New Incredible Visualization Powers!
Based off of these two frameworks, we generated a set of conceptual examples that illustrate new directions for empowering visualization. These future visualization systems borrow metaphors from superpowers and focus on making data feel as empowering as possible to the people using them.
For example, future visualization tools like an acceleration vision system integrated into a car’s windscreen could enhance attention, visualizing changes in the movement of objects on the road, and adding emphasis to ones that behave unexpectedly.
Enhanced counting tools could help individuals make precise and rapid judgements about large or abstract numbers, or support common but high-consequence tasks like counting the members of a school class.
Looking further out, new enhanced comparison tools might use “remixed reality” methods to empower people by letting them align, filter, or rearrange virtual copies of real-world objects. Doing this could make objects, people, and other elements in the world easier to compare—emulating the kinds of physical arrangements created by biologist Charles Davenport or comedian Ursus Wehrli.
…In the Next Astounding Issue!
Our thinking also opens up a variety of additional avenues for research that considers the intersection of superpowers and vis.
We started this project with the assumption that superhero fiction could serve as inspiration for new visualization types, and might also suggest specific visual designs and interactions. However, we soon discovered that epistemic superpowers, especially in comics, tend to be described rather than shown (often as narration by the character using them). When comic artists do illustrate epistemic superpowers in visualization-like ways, they tend to treat them as visual motifs or even technobabble, signaling the complex nature of the abilities but providing little specific detail.
Also, while we decided to focus only on epistemic or knowledge-oriented superpowers, many visualizations (especially persuasive or narrative ones) can also be seen as giving their designers pragmatic power over viewers. Thinking about these as pragmatic powers switches roles, empowering the designer rather than the viewer of the visualization, and we think this represents an interesting opportunity for future work.
Interestingly, we (like most of visualization research) have chosen to focus mostly on positive framings. But, the narrative dynamics of superhero comics, which tend to pit super-powered heroes against villains who use similar abilities for more malicious ends, also lend themselves well to adversarial or “black hat” approaches to vis.
In fact, even the “positive” examples of health- and meeting-oriented visualizations that we propose could easily be reframed as tools for surveillance and control. With that in mind, the narrative structures of superhero fiction might serve as a useful tool for considering the negative social implications of vis systems, in addition to their possible benefits.
Finally, in most fiction, superpowers are possessed by a very small fraction of people, and as a superpower becomes widespread, it may cease to be considered a superpower. As Syndrome, the villain from The Incredibles puts it, “When everyone is super, no one will be.” But, unlike superhero fiction, which tends to focus on conflict, vis research tends to envision futures in which increasing numbers of people have access to our tools and whole societies become more empowered. That said, considering societal empowerment also requires a deeper consideration of equity, fairness, and accessibility, and the value of increasing access to these tools than most of the vis community has shown to date.
Ultimately, our frameworks, examples, and reflections, are a provocation more than anything else. We need to look more broadly for sources of inspiration, and for opportunities for the tools we create to play a role in settings beyond traditional analytic ones. Vis needs more creative and divergent thinking, especially as new platforms and use cases knit it ever closer to the fabric of everyday life!
Want to learn more?
This post is based on our IEEE VIS 2021 paper:
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).
You can find the full paper on arXiv. CC-BY versions of all of the illustrations in the paper (created by Bon Adriel Aseniero) are available via this OSF repository.
