Keywords

1 Introduction

Data are an important patrimony of our contemporary society. Technologies play an important role in producing, managing and analysing them. One of the central challenges is to bring out the information from data, so that people are able to better understand specific events and to make right choices. The academic literature concerning the managing of data focuses on identifying data visualization methodologies and tools that aim to obtain an intelligible and usable information [1]. The main purpose is exploring how it can effectively reach people and meet their (different) needs.

The aim of our work is to explore how a physical representation of data can increase their value and improve their understanding. Such a representation allows to use visual metaphors different from the ones employed in an only digital environment. They use space and movement related elements, resulting more natural and easy to understand [2, 3], unlike the representations based only on digital tools that use more abstract (and so, more difficult to understand) metaphors. In this contest, the digital fabrication, which consists in creating solid and three-dimensional objects through the use of different manufacturing techniques and “open” software and hardware, can be used to make prototypes in a fast way, allowing the test of different tools for the data visualization [4].

2 The “Makerometer” Solution

In this work, we show one application of physical representation of big amount of data: the “Makerometer”. It is designed and implemented for the Maker Faire Rome 2015 [5]. Through this solution, the visitors can express their mood related to their exhibition experience and check the moods of all the visitors of the five areas of the event. It allows to know the real time situation (e.g.: which the most crowded area is, which the most frequent mood is, etc.) and to make right choices concerning their movement within the exhibition (e.g.: to avoid the most crowded areas, to move towards the area which recorded the most positive moods, etc.). The visitors can express or consult six moods, split in three couples of opposite adjectives: inspired – bored; satisfied – unsatisfied; serene – stressed. Each of them is identified by an emoticon [6] and a characteristic colour (inspired: yellow; bored: red; satisfied: green; unsatisfied. violet; serene: blue; stressed: orange) basing on the definitions of the von Goethe’s theory of colours [7]. The “Makerometer” solution consists in four components: mobile native application, web-based application, physical application and central server. They are available on three kinds of devices: smartphone, totem, and physical installation that allow to access to different visualization of the same data, depending from different needs and contexts of use.

The mobile native application (available for iOS and Android), which is the official application of the Maker Faire Rome 2015, allows the visitors to share their mood in a specific moment (Fig. 1), also sending their GPS position during their visit. The server collects these data, operates some calculations (e.g. geographical segmentation of the data, time series, and percentage calculation), and offers them to the other components through RESTful web services. Once the user accepts to use the app his/her GPS position is constantly sent. The system considers the user “active” if he/she is in the exhibition area. Moreover his/her vote is considered in the “real-time” percentage as long as he/she is in the area where the mood was expressed, while in the time series it is considered according to the sampling rate (5 min).

Fig. 1.
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Mobile native application: the choice of the moods

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The web-based application allows to visualize the moodboard of the event visitors, split in the five different exhibition areas (“Next Tech”, “Home, Cities and Environment”, “Makers for Culture”, “People&Life”, and “Learning by Doing”). The Fig. 2 shows this representation. In this visualization, the light blue spheres represent the different areas. The percentage related to each area represents the “active” visitors tracked in that specific area in a specific interval of time (sampling rate 5 min). For each light blue sphere, the different moods are represented by six different spheres having the colour of the related mood. The size of the single sphere for each “area sphere” represents the number of visitors that have expressed that single mood and that are still in the area. Another sphere shows the total amount of people in the exhibition in that moment (according to the 5 min sampling interval).

Fig. 2.
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Web-based application: the moodboard on the smartphone (color figure online)

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The moodboard data can be also visualized on an interactive totem that allows to access to other statistics and visualizations concerning the same data (Fig. 3), including the heat map showing the concentration of people (Fig. 4), the time lapse (during the 3 days of the event) and the segmentation per area. This is made with a web-app optimized for touch interaction.

Fig. 3.
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Web-based application: a different visualization of the data related to the collected moods

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Fig. 4.
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Web-based application: the heat map showing the concentration of people

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The core of the “Makerometer” solution is the physical installation (Fig. 5), realized with an Arduino board and servomotors. This device, that we can define a “physical display”, is composed by five rows, representing the five areas of the exhibition, and for each row there are seven physical spheres, representing the six moods plus the percentage of people present in that area (the “area population” sphere). These spheres can move up and down, according to the expressed percentage of moods. The higher the percentage, the more the single sphere is at the bottom. So, the user can fast note in real time the most populated area and for each area the prevalent mood.

Fig. 5.
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The physical installation of the “Makerometer” solution

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The system works in two modalities: real-time and time lapse. In the “real-time” mode the percentage for the “area population” sphere expresses the percentage of the total visitors of the event that are present in that area. Each mood sphere of each area expresses the visitors of the single area that have expressed a mood and are still there. In the time lapse mode the devices go fast through the time series of data recorded by the server.

This kind of visualization offers a more immediate information, although not detailed, while the web application offers a more detailed information, but it requires more attention to understand the data. The movements and the colours create a “wow” effect combining the functional and aesthetic quality of information visualization.

3 Conclusions and Future Work

The prototype of the “Makerometer” solution used during the Maker Faire Rome 2015 event has been useful to collect the evaluations and the remarks of the visitors. Going beyond the positive results concerning the ease of use and the usefulness of a “physical” visualization of the data, a particular attention has been given to the identification of the fields of application of this solution. In particular, the visitors would use this solution also in the city environment (e.g.: to send and receive feedback from the different city areas), in the work environment (e.g.: to see the mood of the colleagues), and in the customer satisfaction sector (e.g.: to see the product’s customers evaluations). In the future work we will apply this solution in one of these fields.