BACHELOR Assignment
Data Physicalization – What Happens in the Brain?
Type: Bachelor CS
Period: TBD
Student: (Unassigned)
If you are interested please contact :
Description:
Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) give physical form to digital information and computation [1] and enable tangible interaction, allowing users to interact with digital information via physical manipulation. Theories of embodied cognition claim that action and involvement of the body in the interaction are central to cognition [2]. With tangible interaction, it's possible to interact with digital information in a more physical and embodied way. Indeed, existing research has shown that tangible interfaces support cognitive processes such as learning, problem-solving, and memory [3]. Data physicalizations, or physical visualizations of data, represent digital information using geometric and material properties of physical media [5,6]. They are often realized using TUIs, allowing more tangible and embodied means of interacting with data and enabling multisensory representation of data. They have shown cognitive benefits over data visualizations. However, multisensory information can also lead to sensory overload. It is still an underexplored area of how the brain activates while interacting with a multisensory data physicalization. This thesis will compare the brain activity levels (by analyzing EEG data) of uni-modal and multimodal data physicalizations to gain insights into how the brain activates when information is presented multimodally.
References:
[1]. Ishii, H., 2008, February. Tangible bits: beyond pixels. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (pp. xv-xxv).
[2]. Kirsh, D., 2013. Embodied cognition and the magical future of interaction design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 20(1), pp.1-30.
[3]. Price, S. and Rogers, Y., 2004. Let's get physical: The learning benefits of interacting in digitally augmented physical spaces. Computers & Education, 43(1-2), pp.137-151.
[4]. ansen, Y., Dragicevic, P., Isenberg, P., Alexander, J., Karnik, A., Kildal, J., Subramanian, S. and Hornbæk, K., 2015, April. Opportunities and challenges for data physicalization. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3227-3236).
[5]. Ranasinghe, C. and Degbelo, A., 2023. Encoding Variables, Evaluation Criteria, and Evaluation Methods for Data Physicalisations: A Review. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 7(7), p.73.