# Tableau Augmented Reality Chironomia Demo | Tableau Conference

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2023-05-12
- **Format:** Video · 13 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation, Industry trends, AI & ML
- **Tools:** Tableau (ai)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-augmented-reality-chironomia-demo-tableau-conference
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnupMmuOXOE

I react to Tableau's augmented reality demo shown at the end of the Tableau Conference keynote, where Matt presents data using just a standard webcam by pointing and pinching in mid-air. I also walk through the Gartner BI Bake Off context, confess I initially thought the demo was faked, and explain the underlying Chironomia research that proved me wrong.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau's AR demo runs on commodity hardware — a standard laptop webcam, no headset, HoloLens or special staging required, and is designed to work in Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, WebEx and Slack Huddles
- The interface lets you pinch to pull dimensions and measures (country, in-person, virtual) into drop zones, draw reference lines with your finger, link bar charts to scatter plots, and pinch open a 3D globe choropleth
- The technique is called augmented Chironomia, researched by Matthew Bremer and team at Tableau, and works by one-to-one mirroring the WebView back to the presenter so they can see what they're controlling
- Tableau reportedly won the Gartner BI Bake Off comfortably, largely on the strength of this demo against rivals including Microsoft's HoloLens approach
- Tableau's discontinued Visible iPad app had gesture-based interactions that could pair brilliantly with this AR technology in future

## Chapters

- 0:19 Watching the AR demo together
- 1:34 How the live webcam setup works
- 4:07 The Gartner BI Bake Off context
- 5:25 Scatter plots, maps and the 3D globe
- 8:18 My apology and the Chironomia research
- 11:38 Tableau Visible and the future

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-augmented-reality-chironomia-demo-tableau-conference

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena