 Okay, hello everybody. Thank you for coming. We've gathered three of us who have experienced with high resolution display walls. These have been sort of a new thing in libraries over the last three or four years. And so we thought we'd get some of the early adopters out to talk about what they've seen with these facilities. So I'll hand it off to, we're all gonna start off and start talking about our facilities, and then we'll go into sort of a deeper presentation from each of us. So I'm Josh Boyer, I'm the head of user experience at NCA North Carolina State University Libraries. I'm gonna tell you about one of our facilities at NC State. So this is the Hunt Library. This is one of our, now one of our two main libraries. And inside the Hunt Library is the Teaching and Visualization Lab. And it looks like this. So the lab, along with the library, opened in 2013. So we're coming up on third birthday. What's in the lab is 10 projectors that project a Windows server around the room. So three sides of the room, 270 degrees. It's 94 feet wide, seven feet tall, 16,000 pixels across. So it's very, somebody compared it to the view from a welder's helmet. So it's very, very interesting aspect ratio. So you can connect laptops to the screen as well as using the Windows server. And the controls, usually it's a wireless keyboard. There's also an AMX touch panel that drives some of the room. Our staff, our building services staff, set up chairs and tables for each use of the room in different configurations. Here's a typical, here's the lab in action and a typical use case. And the way the access policy for the lab is faculty and grad students can request reservations. So now I'm gonna turn it over to Patrick. And so this is my space here. I'm Patrick Ratchett, I'm from Brown University and this is the three-year-old digital scholarship lab. And basically these are sort of the main elements of the room that I sort of like essentialized out. Got furniture, you've got the display wall, seven by 16, basically 12, 1920 by 1080 monitors, LCD monitors on the wall acting together. Video switcher, two PCs on portable carts and a video conferencing unit. I'm gonna focus on basically the left three. Elements, the flexible furniture, super important. It's the best technology of the room, it's the flexible furniture on wheels. There's the display wall and you've got around the room 14 different inputs, you can plug in HDMI or VGA and then those get routed through to a video switcher and the point of the video switcher is to take those inputs and then put them onto different regions of the wall. And that's in a nutshell the essence of the technology. And there's a shot of the wall in action. Okay, I'm John Brose, I'm the research data visualization coordinator at the University of Calgary and this is our visualization studio. We opened up in July, 2012. We started getting researchers in there. And we have 35 million pixels, ours is run by 15 projectors. We have a variety of inputs, 10 video inputs. The primary way that the wall is used is through the motion keyboard. We don't have touch unfortunately, but we do have a touch table with surround sound and we have sort of a smaller room, just 20 feet by 20 feet. The room is soundproof. Similarly, we also just limit bookings to grad students, staff and faculty. And they get in with the university ID card so that makes it easier for them to come and go as they need. They book this using my email and we're already set up around sort of a low barrier to use. So it runs windows, it runs like your normal desktop just for the really big screen. So that means researchers can come in, show them how to turn on and off and within sort of 10 minutes they're up and going. The other data plugged in and away they go. So this came to be as part of our new digital library. We really wanted the space to support researchers using sort of cutting edge research abilities. And at the same time as we were building the library, they were working on a campus research plan. Part of that plan was seven research platforms. And so when we were thinking about these high resolution display walls that really played well into supporting synthesis visualization as well as analytics and simulation. So it really played into the university's platforms and sort of gave us a nice way to support researchers. We kind of saw four primary uses. We figured people would come in and do analysis on their data. They'd present to groups, they'd host events there as well as do some sort of small group teaching and education. And so we've seen fairly good usage of the weekdays. It was turned off about 50% of weekdays. Someone was in the studio and now we're up a little bit north of 60% of weekdays. So we're getting fairly decent usage. But kind of over the first couple of years, like our main idea was that people would come in and do analysis and it was gonna be a lot of national science and big data stuff. But we noticed really quite quickly that we're actually getting a lot of humanists in looking at paintings, looking at manuscripts, a lot of pictures. And so we were kind of interested in, what was the draw and what were we thinking something different, what was going on. So we did a study, we've just published that, looking at how researchers are using it and why they're using it. And so for the study, what it was, it was a qualitative study. We brought in 14 different researchers. Over half of them are profs, rest of them are grad students. They're from multiple disciplines. They're from humanities, engineering, art, science. So all over campus. And we had to bring in their own data. Some of them had already been in the studio and so they didn't spend too long looking at it because they'd been there before. Some of them were brand new and so they brought in their data and looked at it in there for the first time. And we let them sort of explore for 30 minutes to an hour depending on how much they were finding when they sort of got tired of it. And sort of our big thing that really excited us is there was lots of discovery and insight just from looking at their data on the wall. So we had a researcher who found, can't see it with his projector, but he got him caught in a painting he hadn't seen before. There was different marks found with manuscripts. There was an artist who had these 360 panoramas and he was finding little artifacts in there that he hadn't noticed when he was fixing the images the first time. And so he was headed back to his office to go and fix those up as soon as he was done with us. And this urban platter with the building, there's a sort of nice quote there that just having that building out of a sense of scale, let them actually see that a lot of his predictions were stuck in shadows. And so he was rethinking the design of this building because we actually saw it and realized that he hadn't achieved his objectives. And so that discovery was great. Now, and a lot of these were actually people who were in there for the first time. So they were finding these new things that were helping them in the work. Out of the interviews, we kind of found four different themes for the benefits of this high resolution displays. One is just an immersion. So there was a couple of different facets to the immersion, just the space of having that big a screen to spread your material out on was quite helpful. The fact that we had this isolated room that was kind of dark that could spend a lot of time in was great because then they could actually no dig into that research. And then what we call double immersion is just being able to get their heads into the data and feeling like they're living in that data. So they're really sort of internalizing it, making it part of their mental model. For observation strategies, these are just sort of the ways that people were using it to see new things. They were finding common sources, putting up things, looking for commonalities. They were examining traces. So like looking at high resolution, looking at the fine details and picking out things like a scribes handwriting style on a manuscript. So things like that. Comparing details, just being able to lay out multiple copies and compare and contrast what's different. And also being able to take different data types, spread them out and look at them all at the same time. So having that map, having their image, your text file, all that good stuff and being able to work with it all in one place. Lots of certain benefits to collaboration. You actually have the resolution and the space to take a group of people and not do that with no laptop hunch where four people are huddling in front of one laptop. So they could share things with the groups. They could see enough detail that everyone could be looking at something different. And then also bring in experts and be able to verify things. We got this really great quote. You take a data set, have multiple people looking at it and then go through all the records and really do that double check on their data. And it sort of bypasses that offline where you're sending tens, if not hundreds of emails back and forth to figure out what's going on. You can get all these people in the same room looking at the data set in detail. And last of all, education. To take a group of students who aren't used to your data set and look at patterns and data they're not used to and get that sort of overview of what's going on. And also for those big work processes where you have many different stages, you can have all the stages on the screen at the same time and talk about them. And so kind of our nice quote for that was, there's a prof, he's been working with this data for decades, he's used to zooming in and out, he knows what it looks like, he can get it all into his head but his students aren't there yet. And yeah, they can't take the time to learn but this space sort of leapfrogs them ahead. So they're not, so that education just happens so much quicker. Ah, so out of the study has a couple takeaways. One is that, you know, while size is great, you need the resolution too, otherwise you can't get the most people working on different things. You know, we really ate a discovery and it's improving people's processes for doing their work. And also we have an observational tool here. It's like a microscope or a magnified glass. It's a different way to do observations with digital materials. And so that was really helpful. A couple takeaways, you know, this is working. We have researchers who are actively interested in using the space. You know, we're getting a good amount of usage. Going forward, sort of two areas where we'd like to sort of step things up for next phases would be in, you know, getting better collaboration. You know, right now we have that mouse and keyboard. So that single point of input would be great to go to touch or gesture some other modality for input. And then education. You know, we're in this 20 by 20 room that pretty much eliminates all our undergraduate classes. And so it's really a few smaller classes and graduate classes that can make use of the space that way. One last thing I want to sort of advertise is that we're doing a survey of these visualization spaces. And so expect to see that out through ALA lists coming up in the next couple months. So. So this is my instance of the large scale display. One thing to note about these displays is that they are, don't come through on these slides, is that they are beautiful. You come here and aesthetically they're just, they're fabulous looking. They are different when you're with them. They feel different intuitively. But one thing I just want to mention, put out there right away, and John alluded to this, is that a display wall is not just a display wall, there is a context to it. And that context determines in some ways what technology we're dealing with here. Yes, it's a large display wall, but the context sets a lot of the sort of the, the role of what this technology is. So for instance, yes, it's a display wall, but any technology is interaction between people and the technology, right? That's really what the technology is about. And in this case, with something that's as large as a display wall, the physical location of people relative to the display wall is very important. How it's, how it is related to your perspective. And that is largely determined in many ways by what space it exists in, right? So John mentioned that the space that they're in has a certain, has certain implications for what you can and cannot do. My space, we also have a room around our space. Not many display walls don't have a room around them. And again, that frames it in a very particular way. So this is an eight by 12 meter room. And then there is of course furniture in the space. And that has a big impact on how people use and regard a display wall. So something to keep in mind as you're planning these display wall technologies, all of these things are part of the technology. So for instance, this is immediately adjacent to my space, the DSL. It's an old school 90s cutting edge presentation space, fixed furniture. You can see that the way that people are forced to sit makes a certain social space around the large scale display. And also just like this, I don't know why I include this slide because I have one right here. Projected technology has a certain implication in that you really can't have coming up, you can't go up close because as you go up close you cast a shadow and you lose your data. So there's an implication there, built into the technology about how you're going to interact with the display, okay? So again, we're back to the DSL, you can see I pulled out a bit here, you can get a sense of the space. It's a big space, it's not huge, but it is enclosed and can house a class. You know, you can pack 50 people in, I think Fire Code says 50 max, okay? But you know, a class of 20, 25, even 30 is fairly comfortable there at table. So again, that frames a certain kind of activity around it. It also has a window that was, and it's placed fairly centrally within the library, first floor of the library. It has a window, again, it shapes the way that you regard the technology to know that it's part, there's a continuity with the outside main part of the library, okay? So that's sort of my spiel about context. So even though it is this flexible space with flexible furniture, you can still do traditional presentations in it. In fact, a lot of it is done this way. So in this case, the DSL is not being used in a particularly innovative way, but there is the option for doing, we saw the slide before, a different kind of activity. You can see the furniture has been moved to create a different social space. We'll talk about what's on the screen later. And the wall does not have to occupy front and center, right? You can see that in fact the center of this, the attention of activity in this is on the table. It's the archival materials from one's fucking collections. That's the center of what they're dealing with in these small breakouts. The wall is taking a secondary role for some contextual, conceptual materials. But you know, let's face it, it is the elephant in the room. And more often than not, this is the kind of thing that goes on. And I just noticed things again. It's at eye level, right? NCSU has some gorgeous displays that are way up high. Very different kind of interaction. Very different functional purpose of having a display wall when it's up high in a public space as opposed to eye level within a classroom context. So and you can see this would not work with a projected screen, at least not a rear projected screen. You get shadows everywhere and you know, you just can't approach it physically the same way. So this really, this configuration encourages people to get up close in groups. Again, contrast to that, right? Very different sort of social space, very different functional use of a large scale display. So a display wall is not just a display wall, but also there are different modalities. Now I'm moving from the context to actually what you have on the screen. And I was really just building off of John's study and just sort of taking some of the ideas of like the different functional ways of using these display walls. So obviously you can have a display mode in which you display one big high resolution image. And that's an obvious use for things like presentations, workshops, here you have a workshop going on. I think that's a, you can't see it, but it's a database diagram. It's very good at that, but hardly sort of like fundamentally different. These kinds of sort of satellite images is a moon or lunar landscape, but GIS works really well because you can both get in, see details close, you can move in close, see the details, but you don't lose the context. You can step back and see the larger context of your data. So that is simulated on small screens with pinching and zooming, right? But here you pinch and zoom by physically approaching and stepping back. And so it's good for that. So if you have something you wanna look at close, like a map is a good example, but not lose the sort of the larger context. These display walls are very effective for that. This is a manuscript, again, for this is a class that was run in which they were translating of Latin American manuscripts and the ability to blow it up and see difficult texts. It's important. This is kind of an interesting example. It's a single image. It's from the old, I think it's been taken out of commission, but the old Google Docs draw program, the class is all working together on this document in the middle individually on their classes. So they're collaborating, but they have a single document up there. So even though it's a single document, you can still sometimes use that for collaborative purposes. I think we're moving into something that's perhaps a little bit more interesting in terms of unusual uses or unique uses to a display wall, the ability to show many, many artifacts that are perhaps smaller, but you can show hundreds at a time without losing the detail to make them sort of, you can still get enough detail to have it useful data, but step back and still get hundreds on the wall at the same time. This has very useful purposes for research. This is an example of archeologists working, they bring back digital objects from the field and they get, how do they sort them? Hundreds, hundreds of these digital objects, but they have to be sorted and selected for publication or what have you. This display wall was great because they could work together and quickly scan many of these at a time, whereas on a much smaller screen, it would be much harder. This is an example with a document. Pages came into the library, they were out of order, they had to sort them. This was a great sort of like platform for doing that kind of work. And in both cases, it was great. Lightbox, you know, Adobe Creative Suite works out of the box great on display walls and really supports this kind of fairly fundamental scholarly workflow. So anyone who's interested in that, I highly recommend that, it would just work beautifully. So that was many similar artifacts displayed simultaneously, sort of small multiples. What if you have multiple distinct artifacts? There you get more of a dashboard effect. So this is a very, very simple but very powerful thing. You know, in the middle of class, they want to, Prof wants to show up a video in a PowerPoint or something like that or some sort of like detail and context or just the ability to throw multiple artifacts up on the screen at the same time. Very useful in a presentation context. You see that, this is a lecture that's going on. You know, it seems almost trivial but on the other hand it's very powerful and it's a very simple use of it that finds a lot of use. It's much easier than positioning windows, you know, or something like that within a single desktop. This is in the context of a conference. You can bring in people by hangouts and then still have room for contextual materials. So, and you can also build up these sort of research dashboards. This is a work I did with an English professor. We were looking at, we started with actually catalog data which you can see in this, we're fine document right here, looking at the catalog data and then also investigating some of the holdings represented in the catalog data and sort of pulling them up in various views. And here's a visualization actually of subject headings that we were encountering here. And we, I put together this dashboard so that when we would meet for an hour or two, there would be this dashboard of information that we could view in relation to one another. So this, again, this accelerates or enhances sort of research processes just the way you're digging around in data. It can be very useful. And this really relies on the fact that it's a, both big and high resolution obviously. This would become mud if it were typical projectings to me. And we're starting to do some experiments. This is something I'm working with an Arrarium which is an archive of plant specimens, historical plant specimens. And you can see we're building up sort of a more of an exhibition dashboard but because it's big as well as high resolution, it allows you to do visualization using images from the archive which is housed in our digital archive but also pull in some link data from here. So there's space to bring in lots of contextual information. You're not just limited by a smaller space in which you perhaps would be able to see this. So this idea of bringing in dashboards of information has a lot of potential with display walls. And that's another shot of it. And then because the DSL, I think the DSL sort of one of its more unique aspects is this switcher that allows you to plug in different things and bring them all up at the same time. You know, this is fantastic in the teaching context and this has been, you know, small group work. If you're running a classic workshop, you can have the groups working individually but also have something, say, like an outline for the day, like here. Just being able to, the professor, to be able to watch what's going on in small groups but also students can do peer review and see what else is going on. Here's an example of half the class is watching what's going on and the other half of the class is working and their laptops are plugged in and is being put tripped in and put up on the wall. So I'm gonna, this is a very brief reference to the fact that some really interesting pedagogical practices have emerged in the DSL. I'm gonna zip through this because I'm already over time but interaction is important. We haven't done a ton of work around this but clearly, you know, doing keyboard and mouse with the display wall up there is awkward. It's not a natural interface for display walls. We need to develop better interfaces for this kind of stuff. And we're starting to experiment but I think, and lots of people are. So final reality check. I haven't talked about sort of like on the ground what it's like to run a lab with a display wall. That can come out in the questions if you like but just a quick note to say that there are easy things and there are hard things and I'm sort of giving you a greatest hits. Makes it sound like it's all success all the time but it's hard to get innovation happening. It involves people modifying their workflows, their practices, the way they think about things. So traditional uses come easier. It's a lot easier to get people to throw up as a PowerPoint than it is to rethink the way they teach a class. So innovation is harder. Innovation, having said that, innovation in teaching has, we've found, there's been a lot of innovation in teaching and it comes relatively easily compared to innovation in people's research and that's probably a subject for another kind of talk. And I think John alluded to this. The humanities have been much more forthcoming in terms of jumping on board with their visual artifacts than the sciences, the scientists have been hard to get in. And throughout all this, I think you need to have people there to really push this along and make interesting things happen. So at North Carolina State, this is some of our goals from a strategic plan and so we built a lot of visualization resources. I'm gonna, as I mentioned before, I'm gonna talk about the teaching and visualization lab at Hunt Library. It's actually one of eight of our visualization resources. So before we go to the teaching and visualization lab, let me just give you a quick tour of the other seven. Notice that the ones I've showed you so far, these are all rooms. These are all rooms where you close the door. This is not. So before we go into the lab, let me just tell you who has used the rooms. So not the public display walls, but the actual rooms. I know you can't read this, so I'm gonna read it for you. This is the college, this is by college. So this is engineering. This is humanities, social sciences, design, the business school, education, et cetera. One of the interesting things here about humanities and social sciences, lots of us here today have talked about those customers. What's kind of interesting for them to end up in second place is that Hunt Library is nowhere near them. Hunt Library is located right out, these engineers, most of them can walk out their building and walk to Hunt Library. These people are nowhere near and they're number two. Within engineering, the break down is computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical and aerospace, et cetera. So these are our usual customers. So the reservations we take are from faculty and graduate students, so a little bit more on the faculty side as well as graduate students and then the few other people who've made really compelling cases that made us say yes. So I borrowed this slide from John who broke down the uses this way and that's been true for us as well. And as Patrick was saying, the teaching and events uses come easier whereas some of the analysis and research is just harder to get and requires a little bit more outreach on our part. So with that said though, I'm gonna show you two examples of their more kind of research and they highlight these themes that John mentioned already. So the first use I'm gonna show you, this is a really terrible 2D, really blurry video. So you're having the lamest experience anyone's ever had looking at this. This is the research of a PhD candidate in electrical and computer engineering. His name is Syed Hussein. So you're supposed to view this in the lab with 3D glasses. So that's another aspect of the lab is that it does have 3D capabilities which we're just starting to explore and mostly through this graduate student. So let me tell you what he told us about his research. He says, my research is related to stereoscopic rendering of natural phenomena such as rain and snow in computer graphics. Before using the lab I was generating stereo output using anaglyphs. The anaglyphs though an inexpensive means of viewing and stereo did not preserve color and suffered from image leakage from one eye into the other, also known as ghosting that caused viewers to get headaches. The lab solved my problems by switching to active shutter display. The 270 degree stereo display gives users an immersive feel which they were unable to observe before. The color fidelity is preserved and the images look bright and sharp. He is working in the lab regularly and this is something else he said. The second use case I wanna show this is Dr. Helena Matashieva. She's a professor in marine, earth and atmospheric sciences and she teaches a graduate course in multi-dimensional geospatial modeling. So she brings her graduate students to the lab and they view their data with grass GIS software at a scale they were unable to do before. And their projects range from their modeling erosion at a particular site and they're also looking at the impacts of mountain top removal coal mining in West Virginia. So it allowed the students to see details in their data that were not apparent on their desktop computers. One of the students said my data is one meter resolution so I can really appreciate this. So few lessons learned from three years of having visualization walls. So one is relates to complexity on both on the technical infrastructure side and the user interface. We aired on the side of complexity and that has been a barrier. And so this is a picture of a room that we built in DH Hill Library or other main library in 2014. So one year after Hunt Library. And this room is simpler. I don't mean to say that it's debt simple. Nothing we have approaches what John said about you walk in and 10 minutes later you're good to go. We don't have that. But this is simpler because we're learning some lessons about trying to keep it a little bit simpler. This slide, take my word for it. This is visualization on its finest. What I had to show you was a webpage that described a particular project. So a particular project that my colleague Mike Nut who's here in the room and seven other of our colleagues worked on. And so it was this picture of Mike and all these other people. And that was to highlight that the labor involved in making all this work is really not to be underestimated. That particular project having eight staff all work on one that's a little bit unusual but it is not to be underestimated. Another lesson that we've learned. Events that use our visualization walls have been really interesting and have taught us some events management lessons. So this is the I Pearl Immersion Theater. It's in a nook off the second floor of Hunt Library. And this is a professor using the wall to show photos of his research. And he's lecturing to a group of folks so far so good. And then when you zoom out, you realize that we like 90 people showed up for this. And so they're just standing in the middle of the main walkway of the library. And so we have had wonderful events and the visualization walls have inspired these really interesting uses that have been unpredictable, noisy and really wonderful as well. So that's our presentation and we welcome questions.