⚠ WARNING:
The code in this project is no longer maintained. Use it with caution and check for vulnerabilities!

VisTiles

The VisTiles prototype illustrates how multiple mobile devices can be combined and coordinated for visual data exploration. The basic ideas and principles behind this research prototype can be found in our publication:

Ricardo Langner, Tom Horak and Raimund Dachselt, "VisTiles: Coordinating and Combining Co-located Mobile Devices for Visual Data Exploration," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 24, no. 1, 2017. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2744019

Project website: Further information, photos, and videos can be found at https://imld.de/vistiles/.

Questions: If you have any questions or you want to give feedback, please contact Ricardo Langner (institutional website, GitHub) or Tom Horak (institutional website, GitHub).

Installing and Running VisTiles

We developed and tested this prototype with Node.js v6. After installing Node and NPM, please execute the following commands.

If you start the app the first time, you have to install all required dependencies (see the list)

npm install

Start the app using our start script

npm start

If successful, the web server listens on http://<your-server-ip>:3000/ or http://localhost:3000/.

First, you should open a new browser window and connect to to a debug console via http://<your-server-ip>:3000/debug. This console allows you to simulate the 2D position and orientation of connected devices.

To actually connect a device, open a new browser window and type http://<your-server-ip>:3000/. Next, select an adequate device configuration from the displayed list and click NEXT. Then, if you are not using an external tracking system to capture device locations, click SIMULATE. Otherwise, you can click START PAIRING.

Development

This project is developed by Tom Horak and Ricardo Langner at the Interactive Media Lab Dresden, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. Further development information can be found via the develpoment guide.

If you want to contribute, please check the contribution guide, fork our project, create a feature branch for your changes, and provide us with a pull request.

Acknowledgements

This research prototype uses the World Development Indicators data set from The World Bank. Please check the specific TERMS OF USE for this data.

We thank the following people for contributing to this project: Dennis Esders, Nils Henning, Daniel Fuchs, and Dennis Metzger.