Situated Visualization in Motion for Swimming

TL;DR

This paper explores the design and implementation of embedded visualizations in swimming sports coverage, analyzing current practices and audience interests to enhance data representation in motion.

Contribution

It introduces a research framework for embedded visualizations in swimming sports and investigates audience preferences for data types to inform visualization design.

Findings

Analysis of current visualization practices in Olympic swimming coverage

Crowdsourced survey results on audience data interests

Initial design space for embedded swimming visualizations

Abstract

Competitive sports coverage increasingly includes information on athlete or team statistics and records. Sports video coverage has traditionally embedded representations of this data in fixed locations on the screen, but more recently also attached representations to athletes or other targets in motion. These publicly used representations so far have been rather simple and systematic investigations of the research space of embedded visualizations in motion are still missing. Here we report on our preliminary research in the domain of professional and amateur swimming. We analyzed how visualizations are currently added to the coverage of Olympics swimming competitions and then plan to derive a design space for embedded data representations for swimming competitions. We are currently conducting a crowdsourced survey to explore which kind of swimming-related data general audiences are interested in, in order to identify opportunities for additional visualizations to be added to swimming competition coverage.