On the Design of an Immersive Environment for Visual Mining: Challenges and Results from an Early Study

Observational systems, with the complicity of Internet and information technology, have introduced new ways for collecting and disseminating environmental data. As a consequence, the analysis of increasingly large and complex environmental data sets has become a difficult and time consuming process which can hinder analytical comprehension and insight extraction for decision-making regarding humanity's environmental challenges. This paper introduces new concept of visual mining which presents the data in some visual form, allowing the 'human' to gain insight into the data, draw conclusions, and directly interact with the data. In addition, it discusses some principles toward VTab, a visualization tangible board to support visual mining as part of the whole environmental data lifecycle.