Disperse: Enabling Web-Based Visualization in Multi-screen and Multi-user Environments

For visualization developers, the design and construction of effective applications can often feel like a war against screen space. Every now and then, developers are tasked with building a visualization that will live exclusively on a large, high-resolution display. More often than not, however, visualizations must be built to survive across the varying screen sizes of laptops, tablets, and phones. This may explain why many developers have flocked to the web, where stylesheets can easily be swapped and modified to tailor an application's look and feel to the current screen size. But that screen is defiantly singular. If developers want to tap into a more elaborate hardware ecosystem, they must take on the additional workload of server-side or device-specific coding. To this end, we introduce Disperse, a server-based framework that allows developers to encode multi-screen capabilities into web-based visualizations using a simple set of client-side mark-ups. The framework is intended primarily for authoring new visualizations, but can also be used to add multi-screen capabilities to existing visualizations. Disperse not only imposes minimal time and complexity overhead on the development and deployment of these visualizations, as we show through five case studies, but also allows multi-screen visualizations to be realized across any set of web-enabled devices.