VICPAM: A visualization tool for examining interaction data in multiple display environments

Abstract

Multiple Display Environments (MDEs) facilitate collaborative activities that involve the use of electronic task artifacts. Supporting interactions and infrastructures have matured in recent years, allowing researchers to now study how the use of MDEs impacts group work in controlled and authentic settings. This has created a need for tools to understand and make sense of the resulting interaction data. To address this need, we have designed and developed a new interactive analysis tool called VICPAM. Our tool reduces the effort necessary to analyze and make sense of users' interaction data in MDEs. VICPAM consists of several components: (i) a time-aligned view, which shows users' activities over time and the duration of each activity; (ii) A spatial view, which gives a 2D overview of all users' activities in the environment; (iii) A time-bar, which allows selection of a desired time period for in-depth analysis; and (iv) a video player, which allows the user to watch a video of the session synchronized with the selected period of time. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.