Creating Small Unit Based Glyph Visualisation

Many modern day tasks involve the use of small screens, where users want to see a summary visualisation of an activity. For example, a runner using a smart watch needs to quickly view their progress, heart rate, comparison to previous races, etc. Subsequently, there is a need to portray data to users in small, yet well-defined, spaces. We define this space to be a single self-contained “unit”. In this paper we introduce a glyph visualisation algorithm that creates a diverse range of visualisation designs; each design contains many separate parts, whereupon different parameters can be mapped. Our algorithm uses a path based approach which allows designers to create deterministic, yet unique designs, in a unit space to display multivariate data.