Visualization Shopping: Exploring the Visualization Gallery

Edward Meyer (teammate in the WattDepot-apps project) and I have begun looking through the Google Visualization library today looking for the next big Visualization we can use to give Energy monitoring for an Energy challenge a new kick in a new direction. With the two of us not being the only team approaching the task of looking at these visualizations we looked at several of them and considered what we could do with them and the practical applications of their use. Not all of them seemed productive and we were narrowed down our field to two main ideas to explore and unselected some we felt might not work as well.

Paths of Interest:
1. Rolling Update of Sensor Data (Variation of LineChart)
-This visualization basically combines the idea of the monitor (i.e. get the latest value) with the trend line (show changes over time).
-The idea is to have a visualization where you specify the source(s),the update interval (i.e. 30 seconds, 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day), and the window size (i.e. 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week), and the result is a chart that is refreshed every update interval and shows the last window size of data.
(From Professor Johnson, our Professor for ICS414 offering us possible options)



This visualization concept for us felt rather familiar to us, almost being exactly like a combination of the Visualizer and Monitor for WattDepot-apps. We thought we could use this as a starting point since we both have background in this, but at the same time it is a bit more than just looking through the visualization gallery as it combines two concepts together. Still we thought this might be a good way to start for us as a team.

2. Gauges
-Similar to a regular Monitor only given a visual style and different levels.



While this system doesn’t seem bad, in fact it seems like something we’d be able to start off of rather easily, the problem lies in how the calculations for Red/Yellow/Green would be done. All this time we’ve been working with simulated data, and at the same time the trends for energy consumption might be going in such a way that you’d have to regularly adjust those values, a task which might be a bit over our head planning wise.

3. Bio Heat Map
-Conceptually useful to do a comparison of usage at different times for different sources.
-In a dorm competition the focus of challenging others could be emphasized by showing the point when energy is used the most among many teams and times.



The Bio Heat Map basically takes a bunch of sources and data points within a source and colors them between two color ranges showing greatest to least. Applied to the Energy Dorm Challenge concept that all our work is geared towards, this would mean we could take several Dorms and theoretically plot the energy usage across a day allowing them not just to see what dorm is using the most when but also when a single dorm uses their own personal highest amount of energy. The concept has usages and seems to work just like calling multiple sources for data.

While others do have uses such as the Term cloud to show generally what has the highest energy consumption though words, there was one of the suggested ones I didn’t think would work.

The Geo Map/Intensity Map is designed to show values based on different major reasons, and while it does contain the power to use latitude and longitude values, I don’t think it useful or plausible to map coordinates that aren’t more than a couple feet apart from each other, since it would result in either a really close map, or one with barely any distinguishable features.



For now we are working on looking at the ones we think might work and still considering other possibilities. As we continue along the prospects of using these for Energy monitoring continues to change as we look at ways we can use the visualizations effectively. We should have an idea and a project that would prove to be interesting in the near future.