Control rooms, office dashboards, and other video wall installations—beyond traditional signage—are primarily built for visual data analytics. These systems require mechanisms to display collages of interactive, animated data visualizations, allowing users to analyze multiple datasets simultaneously and make informed decisions.
Academic Research
Data Observatory at the Data Science Institute, Imperial College London, is one of the first academic institutions to explore data analytics using video walls. Its 64-screen circular setup hosts over 30 visualization applications for research areas such as cryptocurrency, bioinformatics, and more.
During my PhD, I investigated collaborative visual data analytics on video walls and served as the lead developer of the Data Observatory’s foundational framework. This framework supported all applications built for the observatory. Subsequently, I continued this research through the Lygos Project, focusing on advanced video wall visualization techniques.
Data Visualizations and Video Walls
Video walls offer unique perspective to data analytics. It can display multiple data visualizations and maps at the same time with full detail. These visualizations can be connected/synched to each other in terms of animation or interaction. They can be charts for data exploration, KPIs for business intelligence, gauges for operation monitoring. There are many use cases in various sectors.
Unfortunately, most of the video wall software focuses to connect desktops to video walls and load basic multi media, rather than focusing on visualization element. Therefore, we created at Lygos to explore this unique approach to video walls.
Multiple Data Sources
One key requirement is to be able to use multiple data sources for collage of data visualization on video walls. This requires again distribution of data to screen and control clients.
Data can be a file, a database query, rest api result. Data can be static, time-series, or updating constantly or randomly.
One of our major problems was to import or connect data to the system and distribute it through a publish subscribe system.
Collages of Visualizations
Multiple data sources can be used to create multiple visualizations in all to all fashion. Two data sources can be compared side by side. Different aspects of a single source can be explored from multiple visualizations of same type. These visualization can be supplemented by maps, multimedia. All to enable the desired view for the users of the video wall. Users should be able mix and match different visualizations in these collages on video walls.
Visualization Configuration
Users should be able to create data visualizations and configure and style them. This allows visualizations to be used in multiple collages. These visualization could be live or can be animated if data is time-series.
Interaction and Control
Interaction is an important aspect of remote data visualization on video walls. Users may want to filter, focus, select, data zoom on visualizations. These should be performed from control clients preferably on tablets/laptops or PCs and reflected to visualizations on the video wall.
Animation of Time Series Data
Data can be static, time-series or it can be live data. These creates five different scenarios:
- Static
- Real-time
- Animated from Time-Series
- Animated from Data Window
- Static Time-Series or Data Window
Static data can a spreadsheet or query result that does not change. If data itself has datetime values, it can be animated as time series. If we connect to data to databases or APIs updating constantly, than data will be updating periodically. If this data is kept in a data window, it can be converted to a time series and again both be live and animated. Finally, we can treat time-series data as static and to display it in 2 or 3 axis chart.
Animation of data requires supplying data values of certain point in time to data visualizations. We can determine the duration. For example, we can animate between 2005-2015 Sales data in 120 second animation. This give each month a second to animate. Or we can animate sensor data from last 60 minutes in 60 seconds, where each minute is animated in 1 second. Navigating animation, pausing, scrolling would take us to data that point in time.
Data Filtering
While applying analytics to data before visualizing is recommended, sometimes users of these video walls might want to do quick filtering. This enables users to explore different aspects of the data.
Synchronized Views
This is a important feature to analyze time series on multiple datasets or multiple aspects of same dataset. Video walls enable multiple visualizations to be displayed as we mentioned. Through synchronization, we can synchronize animation of these visualizations and see each of them at exact point in time during the animation. Users can see how each data changes over time through tracking visually how each visualization changes over time, can pause, go back, focus.
Spatial Focus
Another important feature is focusing on regions and filtering data based on location. Again this enables multiple data and map visualizations to display different aspects of data on different regions as users pans, zooms or enter countries or states names as input and only data in that boundaries are displayed both on data visualizations and maps.
Summary
By addressing these requirements, Lygos Visualization Module enables a novel approach to visual data analytics on video walls. It allows users to:
- Display multiple datasets simultaneously with full detail
- Integrate and animate live or time-series data
- Synchronize visualizations across multiple screens
- Filter and focus data interactively, including spatial filtering
- Mix and match visualizations to create customized collages
This approach empowers users to extract greater insights from temporal and spatial data than traditional displays allow.
For more information visit: Lygos Visualization Module
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