A quick update for our members and followers who didn’t manage to get to (beautiful) Melbourne this time around: Workshop was a success! We had nearly 40 participants and seemingly nobody fell asleep on an intense day. We delivered four lectures that had a nice balance between theory and applications and demonstrated a full experimental session with eye tracking. Thanks everyone who made this happen (organizers as well as participants). More information, proper acknowledgements and at least one selected photo will follow.

Meanwhile, our technical sessions started at the conference as of today and in the first session today we already have heard several interesting presentations that provoke thought on usability and usefulness of 3D visualizations (delivered by Susanne Bleisch), bring new perspectives and the state of the art technology for visualizing spatio-temporal data with HTML5 and WebGL (delivered by Bo Mao). Mark Imhof has shown their impressive set of visualizations including photos, maps, animations, text, tables all neatly integrated and delivered online at the Victoria Resources Online website. This was followed by Thomas Kolbe’s talk on the fascinating subject of disaster management and how visualizations can help or fail in emergency situations with a grounded cartographic approach (and the lack of literature on some aspects of maps of utility networks).

Stay tuned for tomorrow!