Breakout group – Users-museums-planetaria.

State of the Field, including resources, capabilities, needs, and limitations.

Museums

State of the Field

• Museums have a long history of visualization - dioramas through interactive HD-video.
• Visualization as non-verbal vocabulary.
• Captivation to imagination to tell a story.
• Visualization to get their interested in learning more.
• Using visual metaphors.
• Since visuals are subjective, we require an interpretive layer (context).
• Interactive visualization IS a new field.
• Interactivity requires small “social” group.

Resources

• Literature on how visualization and learning.
• Volunteers and facilitators. How do they learn about current missions.
• Coordination of visualization NASA visualization resources (e.g. Mars Visualization Alliance).
• Pooling resources standardize data and tools. Both NASA tools and peer sharing.
• E/PO on NASA missions varies. Big missions are on coat tails of missions. Smaller grants associated with NASA grants $15-20k, coordinated by broker facilitators. $15-20k isn’t enough to do much; time to write proposals is too large compared to the success rate and total money.

Capabilities

• The community is capable to do some of this visualization.
• The museum community has skills that can be used by NASA for E/PO.
• Data format conversion, varies depending on size of museum.
• Define how NASA interfaces with E/PO visualizers, data formats, data types (every mission has a 3D model?).
• Some virtual communities come together for some visualization/mission projects are very helpful. However, they need to be persistent.
• We do best to use visualization to “make it real” rather than excite them to learn more.

Needs

• Interpretation of visual data and context.
• Why should our audiences care about this visualization.
• Best practices on how should interactive visualization are effectively used in museums?
• Social engagement is necessary.
• How to give docents and “live” presenters access to new results and CORRECT science.
• Need components rather than complete pieces.
• Need evaluation studies on visualization in learning.
• Pool resources from NASA. Uniform programs
• Enable sharing between groups.
• If we have a list of resources that NASA is supposed to create for each mission, then maybe NASA provides this as a core E/PO rather than out of the mission.

Limitations

• Different age groups use images differently.
• Costs for things like ViewSpace.
• Too busy making exhibits to review theories of how visualization can be used to learn.
• Visualizations can support other learning rather than being the primary component.

Lessons Learned

• Mars Visualization Alliance. Good to create communities. However it was a fire hose of data. NASA-selected data was used in comparison to raw quicklook.
• Bad visualizations can create misconceptions (and continue them).
• Tell people that they are seeing false-color, when they are.
• Success visualizations and data for visual components are the result of a few driving people. We need to identify these projects and broaden their impact by extending these programs.