Situated Visualization in Motion for Swimming

Competitive sports coverage increasingly includes information on athlete or team statistics and records. Sports video coverage has traditionally embedded representations of this data in fixed locations on the screen, but more recently also attached representations to athletes or other targets in motion. These publicly used representations so far have been rather simple and systematic investigations of the research space of embedded visualizations in motion are still missing. Here we report on our preliminary research in the domain of professional and amateur swimming. We analyzed how visualizations are currently added to the coverage of Olympics swimming competitions and then plan to derive a design space for embedded data representations for swimming competitions. We are currently conducting a crowdsourced survey to explore which kind of swimming-related data general audiences are interested in, in order to identify opportunities for additional visualizations to be added to swimming competition coverage.