Heatmaps

These visualisations show the positions of participants, panels, and visualisations for each task. Each is a birds-eye view of the room using a perspective camera projection, with the grey border being the wall, and the grey centre square in Part B being the table. Brighter areas indicate longer duration which the participant/object was in that area.

The aim of this visualisation was to get a quick overview of how groups laid out and shared their overall workspace.

During the study, the task given to the participants was written on the top-most wall (12 o'clock), hence some participants moving panels away from it.

These show a lot of interesting aspects of how participants organised their workspace:

  • Groups overall tried to equally divide the available space

  • The positions of panels clearly defined each participant's territory, with the only clear exception being G7

  • Panels remained stationary for most groups. Where there were adjustments made to panel positions, this was almost always movements in the same territory, the exception being G9 who moved panels close to each other for closer collaboration

  • Groups either placed their panels along the walls, or "resting" against the centre table

  • Some groups deliberately placed their panels side-by-side to allow them to better see each other's work

  • With a few exceptions, participants positioned themselves such that others could see their panels only by rotating on the spot. The only exceptions were:

    • Red in G6-DT1 who turned his panel around during the task

    • Red and Blue in G7-DT1 who both shifted to tightly-coupled collaboration halfway through the task anyway

    • Blue in G8-DT1-3 who did not account for Red

    • Red in G9-DT3 who prioritised being able to look at the task on the wall in front of him over his teammates

  • Some groups made use of the entire space around them, while others only used a small part

Due to the nature of the visualisation however, it is somewhat difficult to see the thin axes of visualisations. The following shows the same view, but with blocks in replacement of the visualisation-like models used.

Blue represents 2D visualisations, Red represents 3D visualisations.

A few things immediately stand out from these:

  • Participants in Part A used the walls a lot more to pin 2D visualisations onto. While there were some 2D visualisations placed in the centre of the room, this was oftentimes during tightly-coupled collaboration, and visualisations usually ended up being placed on or next to the walls anyway

  • Participants in Part B placed 3D visualisations in seemingly arbitrary positions. Unlike in Part A, these visualisations were not placed neatly on or next to the walls, but seemingly in circular patterns, usually around the participant

  • While Part A very clearly used the walls for 2D visualisations, Part B did not the same for their 2D visualisations. The placement of 2D visualisations appear to be similar to how 3D visualisations are placed

Creation Process

This visualisation differs from the rest in that it was created in the Unity3D game engine itself.

Using the PlayerData and ObjectData, the events of each task was reconstructed and replayed within Unity, using the same scene configuration as the original user studies. This gives the flexibility to re-watch each task from any angle we wish, in this case from above.

Approximately every 5 seconds in the data, we instantiate "dummy" objects for every player model, panel, and visualisation that exists in the scene at that time. These objects utilise an overdraw shader with a blend type of SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha, to achieve the heatmap effect. This process is done for the entire duration of each task, and when finished, a screenshot is taken from an in-game camera positioned directly above the room facing downwards.

The following is an excerpt from the C# code written to automatically take screenshots of this replay: