Mobile Visualisation

Project Title
Mobile Visualisation Techniques for Large Datasets

Visualisations are a quick and powerful tool for data analysis and information acquisition. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming an integral tool in our society. Advances in both desktop and mobile computing and increasing access to Internet access are making information quick to produce and its availability easy. The result is information overload.

While various techniques for visualising and interacting with information on the desktop are available, the mobile platform has very limited resources to cope with information, for example, due to the size and computing capacity of devices used in that platform. It is therefore necessary to explore techniques that can assist development of visualisations in the mobile platform.

The research project aimed to investigate visualisation and interaction techniques that exist, specifically looking at large datasets of categorical and map-based data types. From findings on related work, it has been found that limited resources are a major hindrance to developing effective mobile visualisations, amongst other factors. A visualisation prototype was then developed, influenced by the findings on related work. An evaluation of the developed prototype was done. Results of the evaluation showed that it is possible to develop effective and useful visualisations for mobile platforms. The results also indicated that users were able to report a level of satisfaction as they interacted with the prototype and attributed this to the ease of use of the prototype and simple layout.