PhD Candidate Mr. Wai TONG Received the VIS 2022 Honorable Mention Award

Mr. Wai TONG, PhD candidate of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Huamin Qu and other researchers, received the VIS 2022 Honorable Mention Award for their paper "Exploring Interactions with Printed Data Visualizations in Augmented Reality" at IEEE VIS 2022.

The award-winning paper presents a design space of interaction techniques to engage with visualizations that are printed on paper and augmented through Augmented Reality. Paper sheets are widely used to deploy visualizations and provide a rich set of tangible affordances for interactions, such as touch, folding, tilting, or stacking. At the same time, augmented reality can dynamically update visualization content to provide commands such as pan, zoom, filter, or detail on demand. This paper is the first to provide a structured approach to mapping possible actions with the paper to interaction commands. This design space and the findings of a controlled user study have implications for future designs of augmented reality systems involving paper sheets and visualizations. In addition, this paper summarized interactions (e.g., tilt to pan) that have strong affordance to complement "point" for data exploration, physical limitations and properties of paper as a medium, cases requiring redundancy and shortcuts, and other implications for design. For more information, please read the publication.

Mr. Wai TONG is thrilled to receive an honorable mention award. Furthermore, he would like to thank all the coauthors, Zhu-Tian Chen, Meng Xia, Leo You-Ho Lo, Linping Yuan, Benjamin Bach, and his supervisor Prof. Huamin Qu. They worked hard together and paid much effort into this paper. Moreover, they conducted two studies to investigate the practical viability of the proposed interaction using a mobile AR and an AR head-mounted display (HoloLens 2). Last but not least, they have thought deeply about the design implications for future interaction research and tool development.

The best paper and honorable mention awards of IEEE VIS 2022 are selected per conference track by a dedicated committee of experienced community members. Both awards recognize outstanding work from the pool of accepted papers in each conference track. Best paper committees use a variety of criteria to select the best paper including potential impact to the community, the importance of any results obtained, technical challenges overcome, etc. More details please refer to the conference website.

Congratulations again to Mr. Wai TONG and the researchers.

Wai Tong presented at the IEEE VIS 2022 conference.

Examples of paper interactions on the (a) printed visualization with (b) digital content overlaid: (c) tilt the paper to rescale the y-axis, (d) move (translate) to zoom (e) unfold to show two charts side by side and link them, (f) point to select elements and highlight them in the other chart.

Mr. Wai Tong (Right) and Benjamin Bach (one of the coauthor) (left) outside the presentation room.