Vinked Views

Vinks are visually drawn connection lines (from visual link) between two or more visualizations. They connect graphical primitives. Visualizations can be connected in different ways. VinkedViews supports three of them: Brushing & Linking, VisBridges and Meta-Visualizations.

VinkedViews has been developed as part of a master thesis at the Dresden University of Technology (Technische Universität Dresden). It has since been further developed there at the Interactive Media Lab Dresden.

License / Citing

VinkedViews is licensed under MIT with attribution. So you are free to use this software in any way you want, but you have to give proper credit. Please note that only my own files are under this license. Content from other projects (like Microsoft's MRTK, Unity3D) may have different licenses.

If you plan to use this software for your research or if you base your own software upon it, you can use the following BibTex entry to cite it:

@Manual{,
title = {Vinked Views: An augmented reality app for immersive analytics},
author = {{Georg Eckert}},
organization = {limbusdev},
address = {Dresden, Germany},
year = 2019,
url = {https://github.com/limbusdev/VinkedViewsMR}
} 

VisBridges

A VisBridge connects graphical primitives of two or more visualizations. The connected primitives have to be in a relation - be it directy (graphical primitives represent the same Information Object) or indirectly (the value, the graphical primitive represents, contains the connected information objects value in some way (sum, mean, ...)).

Meta-Visualizations

Meta-Visualizations connect two or more visualizations with a new visualization. For example, Two orthogonal 1D-Scatterplots (axes) can be connected by a 2D-Scatterplot.

Immersive Interaction

To allow precise yet natural interaction, I designed a 3D toolbar made from cubes. That toolbar is attached to every anchor and allows switching between transformation tools and other functions.

Visualization Setup

Setups of visualization can be written in code (hard coded), defined in an XML file or put up manually in the App by using the Visualization Factory.

Setup with XML

The XML file has to be placed in the persistent data path (see Unity documentation) and must be of the following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Setup xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <!-- Position and Rotation of Visualization Factory -->
  <visFactory>
    <position>
      <float>0</float>
      <float>.5</float>
      <float>0</float>
    </position>
    <rotation>
      <float>0</float>
      <float>0</float>
      <float>0</float>
    </rotation>
  </visFactory>
  
  <!-- Data Set ID, Position, Rotation, Attributes and Visualization Type of ETVs -->
  <!--
	Visualization Types:
		
		* SingleAxis3D
		* ScatterPlot2D
		* ScatterPlot3D
		* PCP2D
		* PCP3D
		* LineChart2D
		* Histogram2D
		* Histogram3D
		* HistogramHeatmap3D
		
	Attributes and Data Set ID:
		
		Look into your Data Set files.
  
  -->
  <!-- Examples -->
  <ETVs>
	<!-- Data Set ID and Visualization Type are defined as XML attributes -->
    <SerializedETV dataSetID="0" visType="SingleAxis3D">
      <position>
        <float>0</float><!-- x component of position vector -->
        <float>2</float><!-- y component of position vector -->
        <float>0</float><!-- z component of position vector -->
      </position>
      <rotation>
        <float>0</float><!-- rotation around x axis -->
        <float>9</float><!-- rotation around y axis -->
        <float>0</float><!-- rotation around z axis -->
      </rotation>
      <variables>
        <string>Property crime rate</string>
      </variables>
    </SerializedETV>
    <SerializedETV dataSetID="0" visType="ScatterPlot2D">
      <position>
        <float>1</float>
        <float>0</float>
        <float>1</float>
      </position>
      <rotation>
        <float>0</float>
        <float>45</float>
        <float>0</float>
      </rotation>
      <variables>
        <string>Year</string>
        <string>Violent crime</string>
      </variables>
    </SerializedETV>
  </ETVs>
</Setup>

Providing Data

CSV files must be UTF-8 coded and with Unix (LF) line endings. Otherwise there will be errors. Additionally they must contain the level of measurement in the second row: ratio, ordinal, nominal or interval. If you provide interval, you must provide the unit name as well, like this:

Year,Population,Assaults
interval+year,ratio,ratio
2000,15000,21
2001,15320,21
2002,16011,23

Ordinal attributes must be numerical coded, to provide their order as well. To get their categorical values, a dictionary must be provided as well.

CSV file DataBase.csv:

Date,Time,Address,Crime,Inside/Outside,Weapon
interval+date,interval+minute,nominal,ordinal,nominal,nominal
43288,1433,1600 PENTWOOD RD,6,,FIREARM
43288,1430,ST & DIVISION ST,5,O,OTHER
43288,1398,2500 PERRING MANOR RD,0,I,OTHER
43288,1361,3700 S HANOVER ST,14,,FIREARM
43288,1375,LOMBARD ST & LIGHT ST,5,I,OTHER
43288,1338,1800 W FRANKLIN ST,0,I,OTHER

Lets assume one crime is worse than others, and we have defined an order on crimes - from the worst to the least meaningful, they are coded from high to low. The coding is provided in a dictionary file:

Dictionary_Crime.txt:

0:Aggressive assault
1:Arson
2:Assault by threat
3:Auto theft
4:Burglary
5:Common assault
6:Homicide
7:Larceny
8:Larceny from auto
9:Rape
10:Robbery - carjackacking
11:Robbery - commercial
12:Robbery - residence
13:Robbery - street
14:Shooting

Note: this order is completely random and is only there to give an example.

Provide both files to the DataProvider, and everything is fine.

Dependencies & Sources

Vinked Views is made of three components:

• the Vinked Views Code
• Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit / Holo Toolkit
• Unity 3D

To see which Assets from the Unity Asset Store are used, see StoreAssets.