Morrison, A.,Tennent, P. and Chalmers, M. (2006). Coordinated Visualisation of Video and System Log Data, in proceedings of 4th International Conference on Coordinated & Multiple Views in Exploratory Visualization (CMV2006), London, UK. This article describes Replayer, an interesting platform that "replay" various sources of data, producing multiple visualisations that would eventually help analysts and evaluators of systems (in this case a collaborative location-based game).
Replayer [2] is a system designed to support both log and media analysis through the synchronised presentation of media and information visualisation style data exploration tools. A number of visualisation tools are provided for the visual exploration of log data, allowing an analyst to summarise all statistical data from a trial, or focus on a particular factor of interest. The video data are synchronised with the log visualisations, allowing analysts to make selections in one view and immediately jump to the corresponding section of the video. As well as supporting a richer appreciation of the recorded data, the provision of these multiple views allows an analyst to gain a fast overview of the recorded events and perform time-consuming video analysis on only the most salient areas.
A representation of this replay tool: "Five Replayer tools operating in coordination. Clockwise from top left, the figure shows the video component handling two streams, the event series charting signal strength for each user over time, a histogram and time series showing summary information on a system property and the map showing the recorded positions of users based on GPS. Data is taken from a multi-user mobile application.":
The tool offers different components like time-series and event-series, histograms of event (distribution over time) and maybe the most striking feature is the bridge with Google Earth that allows to display events on a map.
Why do I blog this? because I am working on similar issues (we worked on a replay tool for catchbob previously), but I am less concerned by the "replay" function than producing synthetic representations of spatial coordination of mobile agents. As a social scientist, I am interested in visualization to help me analyzing data from field studies like the one we had with CatchBob. Currently, our direction is to merge logfiles and qualitative coding of messages exchanged by catchbob players in an XML file so that I could create visualization of coordination. This might be relevant for different practitioners ranging from video game designers to sport analysis tool developers.