WaveRider: Immersive Visualization of Indoor Signal Propagation

Network planners consider many factors in designing an indoor signal space to ensure a healthy network. These include material attenuation, channel overlap, peak bandwidth demand, and even humidity. Unfortunately, the current network planning software often fails to account for these factors adequately. Further, state-of-the-art network planning software either uses a few samples or limits itself to a single router. WaveRider is a mixed reality application for immersively viewing multiple routers and their signal strengths in indoor spaces to aid in network analysis. Our contribution lies in our visualization designs made to tackle domain tasks and introduce techniques, such as line integral convolution (LIC) and textons. For early direction and feedback on our visualizations, we recruited five experts in the field of signal analysis, presented WaveRider with various visual representations, and collected their feedback. Their responses show that WaveRider provides novel ways of visualizing signals, which can aid analysts in tackling real-world problems that they encounter in monitoring signal networks. Their feedback also gave us significant insights into future directions for WaveRider and other similar indoor signal space exploration systems.