 |
Visualization
as a Medium for Capturing and Sharing Thoughts
Steve Roth, Steven Roth, MAYA Viz, Ltd and Carnegie Mellon University
As we work in our offices and labs to push the science of visualization forward, in Iraq, visualization technology is saving the lives of civilians and soldiers. The commanding general of a 30,000-person division in Iraq credits visualization-aided thought-sharing for providing his staff and subordinate commanders with insight and a level of situational awareness never achieved in his 30-year career. He boasts of never having caused his eight brigade commanders to risk their lives to cross a dangerous region to jointly analyze information and make decisions.
The general and unit commanders under his leadership are using a collaborative visualization application called "Command Post of the Future", which is built on the CoMotion system. CoMotion, a descendent of the 12-year Visage and SAGE research programs, is used to visualize and interact with data. More importantly, it is used to.visually capture and pool thoughts, interpretations, concerns, and plans among distributed teams. This is an historic departure from the conventional data-centric approach to visualization. While visualization is an excellent tool for expressing complex data, its most profound power is in helping people get inside each others' heads, to read each other's minds with minimal need to verbally communicate, to band together into a single, distributed thinking organism.
We've seen this visual pooling of thoughts amplify thinking and reasoning for different teams of people grappling with complex problems - whether maintaining security and rebuilding a war-torn country, collaboratively analyzing business opportunities, or for assisting teams of physicians and patients treating cancer. In this talk, I'll describe these experiences and sketch the basic principles and research challenges that are emerging.
|
 |
