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Research & Evaluation

Spiral Zoom on a Human Hand

Report date: August, 2008

 

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General Description: 

This report documents two formative evaluations on an interactive media piece that allows its users to zoom in from a human hand to an atom. This zoom uses a spiral to connote zooming and is a departure from a more conventional zoom in which each successive image is a magnification of a portion of the preceding image.

Major Findings: 

• A large number of visitors (76% in the first iteration and 84% in the second iteration) thought that the images on the spiral showed how the human hand is made of smaller and smaller parts.
• With the first iteration, most (88%) of the visitors saw a relationship between the scale bar on the left and the images on the spiral zoom. The percentage declined with the second iteration but still remained high at 74%. Most of the visitors who did not see a relationship between the scale bar and the spiral in the second iteration said that they simply did not pay any attention to the scale bar.
• At the end of the second evaluation, we found that very few people found anything confusing about the zoom. Almost half of the visitors did not think they found out anything new, but some visitors did say that the zoom helped them realize how small these objects really are.

Type of product(s) studied: 

  • Media

Method(s) of data collection: 

  • interviews

Documents: 

application/pdf iconvisualization_lab_-_formative_-_spiral_zoom_on_a_human_hand.pdf

Author(s): 

Joyce Ma

Associated product(s): 

NISE Network product

Multimedia Zoom Into a Human Hand

This interactive zoom, inspired by Eames "Powers of Ten," allows visitors to travel from the familiar scale of their hand down to DNA deep within a cell. This zoom is designed as a stand-alone visitor experience, or to be used as part of a presentation to orient visitors to the size of the nanoscale. You must follow the instructions included with the files to install the Adobe Air application! Please "Download All Files (zip)" and read the instructions first. The resource tab links are also a necessary part of the process in order to run the application directly on your computer.

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