Collaborative Infovis in co-located Environments

It’s seems that the read/write web evolution affected in a very interesting scenario also the infovis world (to me, Many Eyes is the best expression of this trend).

In the meanwhile, in the area of Interaction Design, the trends seems to be focused on simple and friendly approaches, like for example the “touchy” iPhone or (better) some multi-touch solutions (like Jeff Hann’s work).

In this scenario, the project by Petra Insenberg (thanks to Marco for the link) illustrate an interesting solution to use effective information visualization tools in a co-located environment.

The project is based on a smartboard touch screen where users (from 2 to 4) could work on an a shared information space, using the same data-set but through several infovis tools (like treepies or graph-maps for example).

The project is interesting for these reasons:

• the interaction mode
• the shared and the collaborative approach
• the effective use of infovis tools to understand and solve issues

In next days, we’ll have a brief interview with Petra, in order to get a deeper understanding of the project and to have a look to the future of shared, collaborative infovis spaces.

In the meanwhile, have a look to the project details, mainly the paper and the videos about user observation and the system running.